My theory is Harris is a pothead and lacks any drive.

What do you mean by stayed too long? Dickinson just had the best season of his college career and will never stop foot on a NBA court. Staying for him was always the obvious choice and we’d have been foolish not to accept a top 3 guy in college basketball back as well.

Harris also was never that good and his flaws were better hidden with superior talent around him (which this team lacked over the past two seasons). He did regress as far as a shooter this year though, which meant teams didn’t have to respect him as an offensive player at all.

I really thought he was the same player he's always been. Career high in points. Lowest turnover rate. Tied for highest 2 point percentage in his career. We just had no guys that could get their own bucket inside the arc and also had to overly rely on Hunter Dickinson and that isn't ever gonna work out.

Horrible year.

This all falls on Self and his merry band of drinking buddies. They whiffed on Anterio and Timberland. Turned around and whiffed on Griffen and Storr. Then after publicly stating he had 'some guys' we were all going to be excited about doubled down on KJ, Harris, and HD and had a revolving door for the final two spots.

HD is who he is. Really good on the block. Great passer. Can score at an elite clip and you knew he was going to be a liability on defense. You recruited him with the idea of building a program around him yet during his entire time here you never could find reliable shooters or guards who can break down a defense to get their own shot or create for others.

It is very easy to scape goat HD, Harris, and KJ for the recent trend of lack of success, and rightfully so, they have earned that, but Self runs that entire program, and he was ultimately the one who made every decision.

Best 2 things after yesterday....
We dont have to watch this shit team anymore.
We dont have to watch KCC suck Hunters Dick anymore.

Yeah that one hurt when it happened and felt like a crazy upset, but in reality it wasn't. That team had the #2 pick who had a very nice career, the 14th pick who was also had a decent career, and another guy who came back to college and was a first team all American. They beat 2 other 1 seeds. This wasn't like Northern Iowa where we lost and they promptly got beat by 25 in the next round. It was unfortunate that it happened and we were overall the better team, but that's like the best team losing to the third best team, not what Arizona was actually seeded.

What's kind of interesting is the Davidson game is actually the reverse. When it happened everyone was thinking "oh we finally didn't blow it against some crappy mid major" and Self got the monkey off his back. Now you look back and it's "oh we actually beat a top 10 NBA player of all time that's actually a great win".

Maybe that's right.

But what I mean by staying too long is those guys lost the drive. I think they didn't grind and it showed.

I think that's been mostly going on for two years, unfortunately... Dickinson clearly turned it on at the end of the season before falling flat on his face last night.

I'd bet Dickinson could be a turnover machine in a tournament game and not even score a single point in the 2nd half of a loss and he'd still be sucking him off.


....oh wait.

So this is the morning after the night that was and I can see by the post that we're still not feeling very good about ourselves.

BTA, we are! The whole season was a hand washing event!

I've been convinced that Self is the best coach in college basketball for a long time. Now, I'm not so sure.

Every coach in every sport has "their guys" that get playing time over more talented players. But.......every coach has to evolve their style to the current mentality of the players. Look at Reid, He is in charge of everything on the team. Was an old school coach. He evolved to try to make some fun within all the hard work and let them have input in the playbook.

If Self cant accept that he has to coach this generation of players differently than previous generations and how to handle the new system in college basketball of NIL and the transfer portal then he needs to retire or move on to Okie state.

The entire team lacked competitive fire for large portions of the season; it wasn’t just those two. This KU team spent most games just going through the motions.

The warning signs were there early when they just didn’t bother to even try at Creighton and especially Missouri. If you can’t even get up for a Missouri road game, that’a a problem.

Baylor airmailing that alley-oop pass into the 3rd row of the stands reminds me of someone.

Griffen also indicated this after the game last night but the team never truly recovered after that historic collapse against Houston (precipitated mostly by Mayo and Harris). They never executed down the stretch of any game after that and it just felt like they generally lacked confidence in big moments particularly after that point.

There were structural issues even despite that (starting two players that opposing teams simply didn’t guard put everyone else in a bad spot) but when you don’t play harder than anyone else and you don’t execute when it matters, it’s a pretty awful combination to have in a team.