Bill Self takes blame for calling timeout before Jalen Wilson 3-pointer

Kansas head coach Bill Self is one of the best coaches in college basketball, but he made a timeout call Tuesday he’s going to regret.

Up 82-81 in overtime over rival Kansas State with under a minute to go, star forward Jalen Wilson got the ball deep beyond the arc. He took one dribble into a straight-ahead 3-pointer, which he nailed.

However, Self had called timeout right before the play.

The Wildcats went on to upset the Jayhawks after Keyonte Johnson hit a game-winning alley-oop on the next possession.

“The first thing I want to say is we don’t get a shot at the end of regulation into overtime and that’s on me,” Self said after the game. “Then I call timeout when Jalen makes a bomb, too. That could have been the difference in winning and losing right there too. But we don’t get a shot the end of regulation into overtime. We don’t get a stop at the end of the first half. They score two and then we don’t get a stop at game point on a lob. To me, those four plays were the difference in the basketball game.”

Wilson played his best game of the season, scoring a career-high 38 points as he played every second of the game. KJ Adams Jr. added 17 points and Gradey Dick had 16 points, but both players fouled out druing the contest.

Kansas State jumped out to an early lead in the game and led by as many as 14 points in the first half. But the Jayhawks battled back to make it a five-point deficit at the break.

“I thought K-State played great early and we didn’t have any answer for them,” Self said. “Then when it kind of settled down, we played a lot better. I’d have to study it.”

Bill Self proud of team despite mistimed timeout, other mistakes

The timeout from Bill Self may be the headline for the game Tuesday, but the contest does go down as one of the best games of the 2022-23 season so far.

“I mean they could look at, ‘well, we didn’t do this or that,'” Self said. “We can look at we didn’t do this or that. I mean heck, we’re 6 of 29 from three. But we did enough stuff to put us in position to win, which if you told me before the game that we’d have the ball at the end with the chance to win twice I’d say that’s probably be something that we’d probably sell out for. I’m proud of our guys. I thought we fought hard. I thought that we competed. We got a makeshift lineup out there, had three guys out there that never played a game point. But still yet non-excuse, we got to do a little bit better and certainly I got to do a better job of helping them.”