Bleeding Kansas
KU has underperformed in back-to-back seasons. Have the Jayhawks finally found the culprit?
There are few teams I’ve spilled more ink about on Halves Not Quarters than the Kansas Jayhawks. When the only coach in the history of your program with a losing record is Dr. James Naismith, the literal inventor of basketball1, I can see why you might end up in the news a lot.
The last two seasons for Kansas basketball have been historically poor for the program. They would’ve been phenomenal campaigns for my hometown team and a generational run for my alma mater, but for the Jayhawks, hovering around the top 25 in KenPom both seasons and still wearing home whites in the NCAA Tournament nevertheless constitutes a full-blown catastrophe.
The last two seasons for Kansas have been bad. Hunter Dickinson has been Kansas’s star player for the last two seasons. These statements are both true, but their relation to one another is the subject of maddening debate around Lawrence and the college basketball world. Since the beginning of the KenPom rankings in 1997, Kansas has had just three seasons outside of the top 202. Hunter Dickinson has been the leader of two of those teams. Despite his statistical production and sparkling analytic numbers, that’s proof enough for some. Dickinson’s public persona doesn’t exactly earn him many defenders.
Still, others doggedly point to the greater failure in recruiting the pieces around the star. Blue chip freshman recruits M.J. Rice, Elmarko Jackson, Jamari McDowell, and Rakease Passmore, as well as highly regarded transfers A.J. Storr, Nicholas Timberlake, Rylan Griffen, and Zeke Mayo have failed to uphold the Kansas standard for a program that has hung its hat on developing high-level talent into useful college basketball players and irresistible NBA prospects. The opportunity cost of bringing in Dickinson has been high; promising freshman big men Zuby Ejiofor and Ernest Udeh Jr. transferred out of the program, each developing into centerpieces for other high major programs, with EvanMiya ranking them as the 39th and 134th most impactful players in the country last season. Other potentially useful pieces including Tyon Grant-Foster and Tristan Enaruna have gone on to star at the mid major level, rebuking a common narrative that the transfer portal has been universally negative for lower level teams, and bringing into question whether the transfer portal has helped Kansas at all over the past few seasons.
With the past two seasons in mind, all eyes turned to Kansas this offseason to see who would take the hallowed floor of Allen Fieldhouse and restore the Jayhawks to college basketball royalty. As far as silver bullets go, Darryn Peterson might be a decent bet. Oscillating between the #1 and #2 spots of the 2025 high school class, Peterson is a giant guard with even longer arms that effortlessly flows around the court and finishes with thunder around the basket.
Does he solve Kansas’s problems, though?
Over the last four seasons, the Jayhawks have quietly been one of the worst three point shooting teams in the country. While Kansas’s percentages from behind the arc have been passable over the last five seasons, the Jayhawks haven’t taken almost any. In fact, they’ve been noticeably timid from behind the arc. In that same timespan of the past five seasons, 280 teams across the country, on average, have taken more shots from behind the arc per season than the Kansas Jayhawks.
Darryn Peterson shot somewhere around 30% from three against high schoolers. Another major portal acquisition this offseason, Saint Bonaventure’s Melvin Council Jr, shot under that mark last season. Illinois transfer Tre White couldn’t knock down a third of his threes last season, and sophomore center Flory Bidunga didn’t make any in his freshman season. That’s four of Kansas’s projected starters next season with no traces of floor spacing.3 Elmarko Jackson shot 27% from three as a freshman, Jamari McDowell did little better at 28%, and freshmen Bryson Tiller and Samis Calderon are both lauded as terrific athletes, with three point shooting nowhere to be found in their glowing reviews.
Low attempt rates from behind the arc are nothing new and perhaps nothing fatal for Kansas, as both of their most recent National Championship teams ranked 287th in three point attempt rate, but it has presented a clear avenue for improvement over the last two seasons that hasn’t been taken. I don’t want to suggest that the game has passed Bill Self by, but it’s clear that the Jayhawks, despite the financial privilege to do so, have not made three point shooting a priority. Without a dominant inside force like Udoka Azubuike, David McCormick, or, I don’t know, Hunter Dickinson, I think that could be a recipe for disaster this season.
But, there’s a blueprint for it to work. The same accusations of luddism were leveled at Tom Izzo last season after a few down years, and he proved that, with a talented freshman to shoulder the scoring load, a team of poor three point shooters can still win in college basketball by playing elite defense and capitalizing on every turnover with fast break points. The Jayhawks defense hasn’t faltered over the last few seasons, but it will need to be transcendent, in the way that Michigan State’s was last season, in the way that St. John’s was last season, and in the way Kansas was in 2019-20 when the Jayhawks were the odds-on favorite to win the NCAA Tournament.
If not for a global pandemic, the Jayhawks might have two national championships in the last half decade. Crisis is a relative term in Lawrence.
Lurking in the darker corners, however, are a foul pool of naysayers with generational grievances wishing shine light on another handy correlation. Just as Kansas’s struggles have coincided with Hunter Dickinson and just as they’ve coincided with poor three point shooting, the falloff in Lawrence also correlates nicely with the liberalization of player payment through the NIL scheme and the end of an FBI investigation which resulted in the program receiving a three year probation from the NCAA. Now that everyone can buy their players cars, Kansas basketball suddenly doesn’t have an edge. The theory is somewhat challenged by Kansas’s continued ability to enroll highly sought after players like Dickinson, Storr, and Peterson, but the idea that KU’s major advantage in the preceding decades was simply their willingness to break the law is far too tantalizing for detractors to get caught up in the details. Coaches don’t get nicknames like Dollar Bill unless a few palms are greased.
Hunter Dickinson is a very easy scapegoat for Kansas’s struggles of the past two seasons; he’s not exactly a player that’s easy to root for, even among Jayhawk partisans. But, if KU fans and the college basketball world at large get too wrapped up in Dickinson’s acrid personality, they risk missing what is potentially a bigger developing story with the sport’s most storied program. Whether it’s my lurid claim that Self isn’t adapting to the modern game, or the message board trolls celebrating the Lawrence Laundromat closing, there’s more to this story of decline than a center who averaged a double-double every night and finished fifth in KenPom’s Player of the Year metric this season. Kansas may have come to regret Hunter Dickinson becoming lodged in their side, but I have a sinking suspicion that his removal might just make the bleeding even worse.
A man going by the name of The Human Calculator disputes this claim and instead points to Herkimer, NY as the birthplace of the sport.
I don’t include the COVID-wacky 2020-2021 season in my data.
The fifth starter, Loyola Chicago transfer Jayden Dawson, is no deadeye himself at just 36% from three.
