My Beloved Jayhawks

Well, Jayhawk football has yet again failed to make it to a bowl game in consecutive years. Of course when you blow two games in which you hold large leads in the fourth quarter you don’t deserve to go to a bowl game.

Since football is over we might as well talk basketball. The relatively minor struggles of the Jayhawks have been much discussed in my family recently, and I have a theory. Granted I haven’t been able to see all the games yet (still waiting on DVD’s from my friend back home that’s recording the games for me), but I did see the Florida game.

In spite of what everyone said about it being a well played game it didn’t look particularly well played to me. The final score was misleading about the offensive output due to overtime. Florida had massive foul trouble throughout the game so were not at their full strength. KU made several mistakes that would have been fatal against a team not plagued by even bigger errors. This wasn’t so much one team grabbing victory as it was which team made less mistakes.

On, then, to my theory. Comparing Bill Self and Roy Williams is inevitable. Roy coached for a lot of very successful years at KU and these early season losses to inferior teams were very rare. However I can’t recall a team that Roy coached that didn’t have an upperclassman who was a vocal leader. KU is certainly lacking that at the moment, but my hope is that Julian Wright finds his voice and yanks the guys out of their stupor.

What does this have to do with my theory? Well, not much actually, that was a bit of digression. Now really to my theory. To me it appeared that from the beginning of the season Roy coaches his transition game. He pounds that into his players from day one of practice each year. This leads to his teams always looking very impressive early because early in the season every team is more focused on what they’re doing than game-planning for their opponents. KU fans got used to this approach which makes early season setbacks tougher to take now.

Bill Self has a different focus. He believes very strongly that ultimate success is rooted in lock down man defense which requires effort and focus night in and night out. His determination to instill this belief in his players at the beginning of the year leads to an offense that can be pretty anemic and a lack of defensive adjustments.

However the more I think about it the more this approach reminds me of how Norman Dale approached the Hickory team. He knew what it was going to take to win in the end and he wasn’t going to be put off of that vision by a few early losses or some criticism from the fans. Bill Self is the same way.

He’s just now got the team understanding that you win games when shots aren’t falling by making sure the other team’s offense is struggling as well (USC and Depaul went a long way toward proving that). Now I think he could make this point much more quickly if he would do a wholesale benching of guys that aren’t giving effort for walk-ons that will. I always thought that was one of Roy’s most effective tactics.

Now that Coach Self has got them going down the road to believing in his philosophy he’ll start putting in the defensive wrinkles and offensive sets that can make this team lethal. Now he has time with Christmas break to truly add all the X’s and O’s that when combined with the effort can make KU a great team. You can tell by his most recent comments that he’s been waiting for this stretch of relatively few games and lots of practice time.

The next few months are going to be a lot of fun!

Rock Chalk!
Frog