Bill Self shares biggest concern about Kansas roster

Kansas is in a real hole heading into Saturday night’s matchup at Kentucky. The Jayhawks are losers of three straight with their worst performance coming in a 23-point home loss to TCU last Saturday. Bill Self’s club let up 83 points on their home floor in that humiliating defeat, and even though they only scored 60, the Kansas head coach was far more disappointed in their defensive play after the game.

“I’m worried about them guarding somebody more than I am scoring,” said Self after the TCU loss, before going on to explain where else his team came up short vs. TCU. “I think when you worry about the right things, you score more points. And the right thing with those guys needs to be we need to lock in and get stops. Understand that this guy goes right, this guy goes left, understand on out-of-bounds plays they’re gonna dive the guy from the weak side every time. There’s a lot of simple things that we didn’t do today that that that to me put us in a situation where we had to play too good on a day that we weren’t that good.”

Self continued:

“We put ourselves in a hole. There’s been a lot of games that we’ve had in this building like that. And some way or another we make the other team shoot a low percentage in the second half and climb our way back in and in. Can’t make a shot but we’ll get a second, a second or third opportunity and knock down that three that we just didn’t have you need that today. We just didn’t have any of that today.”

The Jayhawk head coach issued a challenge for his starters to perform better while complimenting his bench for filling in where necessary.

“I think what we got to do is get our starting five playing better. Guys, our bench isn’t such where they’re going to make a huge difference in us winning or not winning. The way they can contribute the most is defending, not turning it over. Getting confidence from doing the things that don’t show up in the stat sheet and then they’ll get more confidence moving forward. But I don’t think that the scoring off the bench is the same with our program right now as it is theirs.

“But there are ways that they can help us. But that’s not the problem today. That’s not the problem. We can talk about bench. We can talk about getting more production and all that stuff. That’s not the problem today. The problem is the guys that played the majority of the minutes didn’t really do anything, nor did we get them to do anything to get the other team to play poorly. That’s where the issue lies and we got to clean that up.”

A lot to clean up for Bill Self and Kansas as they march on with their brutal schedule.