Puzzling Lack of Angst
For many, many, power conference college basketball teams, the NCAA tournament plays a far too dominant role in defining how a season is judged. A lackluster year followed up with a couple of tournament wins can be deemed a success, while a truly fine season can be badly undercut perception-wise by an early exit.
In far more rare cases the tournament is pretty much a reflection of how the season went, and one of those is the 2018-19 Kansas Jayhawks. KU was a wildly inconsistent team that reflected their youth and the general turmoil that surrounded the team due to circumstances outside of their control, like injuries, and self-inflicted distractions. So, a tournament performance that featured a dominant win against an overmatched opponent, followed by a complete no-show in a game that was deemed a virtual toss-up kind of fit the bill.
Perhaps that is why there was a somewhat puzzling lack of disappointment as KU got drilled by Auburn Saturday night in Salt Lake City. You know, it’s nice to be have a program where if you have a bad loss you can kind of brush it off. But it does feel a bit like entitlement if you just totally shrug the same shoulders.
Last night as Auburn was roaring out to a huge lead, I was seeing something on my Twitter feed that I wrote about yesterday, the lack of real angst among KU fans. KU was the higher seeded team, although Auburn was slightly favored, yet the general vibe was that there was no real disappointment as KU was getting their ass kicked. Bill Self and his players felt the sting after the Auburn game. I didn’t sense the fans much did.
In the last three important games that Kansas played, they were murdered. At Oklahoma with streak protection on the line, against Iowa State with a chance to mute that with a Big 12 tournament title, and then with a chance to let their fans have at least a couple days of partying at the Power and Light.
To their credit, slightly, Kansas showed at least a little fight after getting down 26!!! at the half in the eventual 89-75 loss, but it was never even a semblance of a game, the final score as close as KU got the rest of the way.
I am not sure that is a good thing that ho-hum is the general reaction. It’s OK to be a fan base that expects great things, but to just brush off this kind of performance, and assume another year will bring great things, is a bit off-putting. You are supposed to care about your team and the players who are on it enough that not even tweeting at least a little dismay is disappointing.
Yes, this team had a whole lot of things to deal with, but if you want to root for this group next year, if indeed most of this group is back to root for, you have to be at least slightly bothered that in three of the biggest late season games they faced, they got slaughtered.
Bill Self did a pretty damn good job of even getting this team to a 4 seed. They are limited, and likely won’t be as much so next season. And I would imagine that with much of the same group back next year there would be some great motivation as they enter 2019-2020.
The fact, however, remains that an unbelievably lengthy era of unbridled excellence ended with a thud. The good part is that it is a Kansas style thud, a 26-10 thud, a number four seed thud. It’s only the second time in the Self era that they have even lost ten games.
Also, you can easily make a parallel to make to make things seems rosier. The last time that Kansas was a number four seed was in 2005-6. That team was bounced in the first round by Bradley. The core of that team was a bunch of freshmen. Two years later they won the national championship. I certainly am not going to sit here and say that is going to happen again. It’s a different world now, players tend to go pro even when it seems like a bad idea. Quentin Grimes might leave this year. Mario Chalmers stayed around three years, long enough for him to nail one of the iconic shots in KU history. That likely wouldn’t happen now. But still, is would seem that most of the players who were part of this year’s roller coaster will be around to try and make it be more aberration then trend setting.
It will be interesting to see how the players who were “scared to death” (Bill Self’s words) as Auburn undressed them in the opening half will react. There are so many unknowns right now for the program. The FBI investigation has a long way to go. Kansas already has lost a player a year to the whole thing, and their recruiting class features players who are well thought of, but not the usual parade of McDonald’s All-Americans.
But the brightest light for Kansas fans who do believe this was merely a blip on the radar screen is Bill Self. This week’s strong assertion by the Hall of Fame coach that he is in it for the long haul is music to any fan’s ears. Self just did one of his best, if not his best coaching job, in this star-crossed season.
The biggest question is whether the whole environment in the short term will create new challenges of the same type for him to overcome.