Kansas coach Bill Self’s Jayhawks bounced back from their loss to the North Carolina Tar Heels with a 77-46 win over the Texas A&M-Corpus Christi Islanders on Tuesday. The win improved the Jayhawks to 2-1 for the season.
Amid this, one analyst raised concerns about Self’s Jayhawks becoming like former Kentucky Wildcats coach John Calipari. In the last few years of Calipari’s Kentucky tenure, the Wildcats went 71-30 and won just one NCAA Tournament game, while in the last three years of the Self era, the Jayhawks have gone 73-32 and won two NCAA Tournament games.
Analyst Compares Bill Self to the End of the John Calipari Kentucky Era
During Monday’s segment of the “Brandon Ramsey College Basketball Show,” Brandon Ramsey gave his take on Self’s tenure so far, saying, “If you look back at the last couple of years, since they won the championship in 2022, at what point does this turn into the John Calipari situation at Kentucky.”
“Coach Bill Self is one of the best basketball coaches to ever do this at the collegiate level. But, since then, you have two round two exits, then a round one exit. They’re trending in the wrong direction,” Ramsey said.
“They go from 28 wins to 23 wins, 21 wins. You’re barely getting over .500 in the Big 12. If there’s another season like that, as much as Darryn Peterson can be a star this year, at what point do we start to have some conversations? When you’re looking big picture, at what point are we gonna have some concerns about coach Bill Self and the Kansas Jayhawks moving forward in this era?”
Calipari won the national championship at Kentucky in 2012, but only reached the Final Four twice after that high point. On the other hand, Self led the Jayhawks to the national championship in 2022, but has not gone past the second round since.
During his postgame news conference after the loss to North Carolina, Self downplayed the fact that his team didn’t have any answers to Tar Heels star Caleb Wilson, who helped them come back from a 37-29 deficit in the first half to overwhelm the Jayhawks.
“It is adversity when you talk about the game. It’s not adversity in the course of the season. Things happen all the time. How many teams are going to come in here and beat Carolina on their home court when they get cooking like that in the second half? Not too many.”
“But it teaches us that there’s a lot of things we got to do to be better in those moments and be tougher and harder and more sound, which we obviously weren’t. And that’s on me. But, if teams can handle adversity on November the 8th, they’re probably in for a long year.”
The Jayhawks have a string of elite matchups in the next few weeks, with clashes against the No. 4 Duke Blue Devils, Notre Dame Fighting Irish, Syracuse Orange, No. 3 UConn Huskies, and Missouri Tigers.
