Bill Self reveals he never contemplated leaving Kansas amid NCAA investigation

Bill Self has helped to continue on the very proud basketball tradition for the Kansas Jayhawks. He’s one of the best developers of talent in the game. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t faced lots of adversity during his tenure there, including the exhausting NCAA investigation the Jayhawks survived. Luckily, Self and his staff avoided any sort of major penalties following the investigation, but they still had to deal with a number of significant recruiting limitations.

Recently on The Field of 68 podcast with Jeff Goodman, Self revealed that he never contemplated leaving Lawrence during the investigation.

“No, no, no. I would have never thought that,” Self explained. “Until we got through it. Never entered my mind until we got through it. What was so disappointing to me was the narrative which I thought was not only unfair to me. And to our program and to coaches, but others as well. That’s not associated with Kansas.”

“The narrative that the NCAA, in my opinion, tried to create to offset what the FBI had come up with at that particular time. I think there’d be some people that would agree with me on that. But dealing with the unknown when you’ve got a muzzle on your mouth where you can’t speak about it. Or whatever the narrative people want to talk about is the narrative and you can’t defend it,” Self continued.

“That was tough on everybody. And then probably the most proud thing was that we actually won a national championship at the height of it. We weren’t able to recruit the same way that we’ve recruited in the past and the kids we go after. The Christian Brauns and the Ochai Agbajis and the David McCormacks, and the Jalen Wilsons, and the Remy Martins, and the Dajuan Harris. Guys that basically came to us very underrecruited. We knew they were good players. But we had no idea they’d turn out to be the level which they have. That made it very gratifying and fun,” Self explained.

“To your question earlier. That was probably, even though it was a negative time, that’s probably as much fun as I’ve had within the lines. Coaching those kids. And having them achieve and play to the level that they did, at a time where it was probably the hardest to do so,” Self finished.

The 2021-2022 Kansas team earned a No. 1 seed in the 2022 NCAA Tournament. They defeated the Villanova Wildcats in the Final Four. the Jayhawks defeated North Carolina 72-69 in the national championship game to win the second national title under Bill Self. It was also the Jayhawks fourth NCAA Championship in program history.

Kansas is expected to have one of the best rosters in America yet again coming into the 2024-2025 campaign. They’ll be led by big man Hunter Dickinson, a preseason consensus second team All-American selection. They also surrounded him with a number of talented pieces from the transfer portal.

Kansas will officially kick off their season on November 4th against Howard. But before then, they’ll have a few exhibition games and Late Night in the Phog. That will be a scrimmage between all of the KU players, and a chance for fans to get an early glimpse of the roster.