Norm Roberts shares best part of Kevin McCullar's play

Top-seeded Kansas advanced with an opening-round with over Howard, and the Jayhawks did so with guard Kevin McCullar back from injury.

McCullar had been battling a back injury and back spasms that forced him to miss the Big 12 Championship Game against Texas. But after getting a little extra time for rest and recovery, he was cleared to play in the NCAA Tournament opener.

He had a very solid game, contributing 10 points, seven rebounds, five assists, two steals and a block.

It was a do-it-all performance that interim coach Norm Roberts raved about.

“(I like) everything about how Kevin plays,” Roberts said. “Kevin plays to win. He does all the little things, be it cutting to the basket, offensive rebounding, making the extra pass, and he’s a terrific defender.”

Kevin McCullar is the third-leading scorer for the Jayhawks on the season, averaging 10.6 points per game.

If Kansas is to make a deep NCAA Tournament run — and by all accounts it’s certainly capable of doing just that — it will likely require McCullar being in the lineup. So him showing he’s fine with a 25-minute outing against Howard is huge.

“Kevin would be if you put a quote by him, he’s a winner, he’s a winning player,” Roberts said. “He makes winning plays all the time and it’s not always making a basket. He makes winning plays.”

Kansas upped the pace against Howard

One thing Kansas did in its NCAA Tournament win over Howard was pick up the pace considerably.

The Jayhawks ran and forced the Bison to keep up. They couldn’t.

“We always want to play fast,” Roberts said. “We’re better when we play fast. Juan had a game that’s not really like his type game. He doesn’t turn the ball over like that. I think he got fatigued, he made a couple of bad passes and we made a couple of wrong adjustments, too. We like to play fast, they got up and down and we knew if we could rebound the ball, which we didn’t do a great job of that today but if we rebounded the ball we could get out and have some opportunities. That happened today.”

The 96 points the Jayhawks scored was the most by a defending champion since Florida in 2007, according to ESPN Stats & Info. That Gators team was the last one to win back-to-back NCAA Tournaments.

However, Roberts also said it was probably a little too up-of-control for Self’s liking and would likely hear it from him when they returned back to the hotel.

“I don’t know [if we were] well-oiled. Because I know Bill Self is gonna kill me when I get back to the hotel. We got into a rat race game. I mean, it was going up and down. Our guys were like, get me out, I’m tired. But we made some big shots. We got stops when we needed, but we really gotta tighten up our defense,” Roberts said.