LAWRENCE, Kan. — The door slides open to a second-floor entrance hall inside Allen Fieldhouse, showcasing a lobby full of trophies so abundant that you’d probably need to count them twice to ensure you got the number right.

It doubles as a waiting room for Kansas men’s basketball coach Bill Self’s colorful and vast office, where, inside, a reminder of the Jayhawks’ 2022 national championship comes in the form of a mural. There are enough keepsakes in here to fill a most interesting lifetime, comprising an environment that could best be described as cozy.

Well, with one exception.

There’s the man behind the desk, watching basketball film on his large desktop computer screen.

“I would say, from my standpoint,” Self said, “this has been probably as frustrating as it’s been for me.”

In case you haven’t heard — and how haven’t you? — Kansas basketball stinks right now.

And I don’t mean they stunk up the joint at BYU, though they sure did that in a record-breaking loss for Self’s tenure, nor just that they had a sour road trip to Utah. This is not a case of the sniffles. It is a season-long ailment, with a preceding offseason at least partly to blame.

After spanning two decades without more than six Big 12 Conference losses in a season, KU has lost seven-plus two straight years. A program that once strung together 14 straight conference titles (or a share of those titles) has already been eliminated from the league race ... with five games left on the schedule.

Self, in his literal position as KU’s head coach for 22 years now, has never been in this spot.

The Jayhawks will fall out of the Top 25 next week for just the second time in those 22 seasons. It puts into perspective just how good it’s been. Look around. You won’t find a better streak anywhere else.

Kentucky has missed NCAA Tournaments altogether. North Carolina, too. Even Duke. If KU falls below the 4-seed line, and it almost certainly will, that will be a low under Self.

The point is, by a Self-built standard, something is amiss at KU. The point is that this doesn’t happen here.

“Pissed. Frustrated. Impatient,” Self said. “Those are all the things I’ve felt. But isn’t that what almost 100 percent of coaches feel at some point every year? We’ve dealt with those things — we’ve had challenges that the public doesn’t know about — but they haven’t become public because we’ve won. This is public because of the record.”

The record.

That’s the unfamiliarity territory in which Kansas finds itself, and we can’t consider it happenstance that it coincides with the relative unfamiliarity of college basketball’s new era.

There are a lot of reasons why the preseason No. 1 team in America is under-performing this season, as convenient as it might be to pin it on just one.

But it starts there: Self and his staff haven’t adapted quickly enough to a newly competitive era of NIL (name, image and likeness) and transfer-portal slot machines. It’s as though someone swooped in and stole the Jayhawks’ Ferrari and replaced it with a Honda Civic.

Serviceable, but no longer the front-runner.

Self, 62, hasn’t suddenly forgotten how to coach — and I’ll note that next year will look a lot different for KU, in a lot of ways — but there is a lesson KU can learn, must learn, no matter how this exasperating year concludes.

Through all of the chants for lineup changes, amid all of the complaints about perceived misses in the transfer portal (which have some merit, by the way), there’s a more stark explanation for why the Jayhawks are barely .500 in Big 12 play this year:

They failed to properly evaluate their own talent.

KU sought supplementary pieces but didn’t press itself enough about what exactly it was supplementing. The Jayhawks kept the main thing as the main thing — center Hunter Dickinson, point guard Dajuan Harris, forward K.J. Adams — and therefore ensured they’d once more try to retrofit a slow, methodical offensive style in the year 2025.

Those last four words again: In the year 2025.

Three seasons after winning a national championship with a four-out approach, Kansas ran it back a second straight season with three core pieces who ought only to be shooting from deep if the shot clock is nearing zero. To be sure, they tried to add 3-point shooters in the portal, but Rylan Griffen and A.J. Storr have been awkward fits for just about everything KU wants to do.

Which hits at the crux of another issue: These pieces run closer to opposition that complementary.

“Our roster, in my opinion, is good enough to play a heck of a lot better than we’ve played,” Self said, “so I’m not going to blame it on the roster.”

Both can be true, though.

After KU lost a game to Iowa State this year, Self not only complimented the program built by Cyclones head coach T.J. Otzelberger, he also got specific about ISU’s roster and use of NIL.

“The bottom line,” Self said then of Iowa State, “is the pieces fit.”

On Thursday, I asked him if that was also a reference to his own team.

“I think in some ways it probably is,” he said, and as I began the next question, he prolonged his initial answer.

“And this is what’s frustrating to me: Our pieces fit our culture too — to an extent. Because how do you beat Michigan State, North Carolina, Duke, Iowa State in the manner in which we did if you did not have the potential to have that fit?”

Well. How do you explain that?

“I think our talent is good. I think we have good players. But I think we’re good players collectively, and not nearly as good individually,” he said. “There are certain times the pieces don’t fit. But let me tell you something: In life, there’s a lot of times the pieces don’t fit. That’s life. How do you make it work?

“That’s where I have done a poor job of making it work in the manner in which it potentially can.”

There’s a lot to unpack there, but it’s first notable that KU is even in that place, wondering how to make its pieces fit.

They don’t, by the way. Not really, anyway, which once more tracks back to the construction of the roster.

The inauguration of NIL, coupled with an expanding transfer portal, requires teams to find quick roster fixes. And a KU program that has been masterful at long-term care hasn’t been able to swiftly staple shut its wounds.

It has robbed Self of one of his greatest strengths and exposed a vulnerability: He develops players over the long-term better than anyone in the country, but he doesn’t have the same advantage when required to provide the crash-course of his system.

His best KU teams had young talent, to be sure, but they had something more: experienced three- or four-year players, guys who were often their best players without being their best NBA prospects. Self molded those pieces to fit the culture.

He had the time. The players had the patience.

That’s not the way of this world anymore, and this year KU is playing catch-up.

But it also speaks to the three- and four-year players this team does have — to the core with whom Self sought to give it another go this year. The decision to find merely supporting pieces necessitated that the team’s holdovers play like stars.

And that’s been a description that has suited none of them this year. Opposing teams pick on Dickinson’s slow feet on defensive end and take advantage of Harris’ and Adams’ inability to shoot on the other end. It’s been awhile since any KU player put the team on his back — even for a stretch, let alone a game.

Thus, after a year in which they determined they needed to have better perimeter shooting, the Jayhawks have moved from 338th in 3-point distribution all the way to ... 269th, according to KenPom.

Self’s teams haven’t always been ultra-talented. His last national championship roster wasn’t exactly littered with highly-recruited players. But they grew, even if sometimes their growth took years. Again, time and patience.

That makes this season a staggering contrast: Kansas has undoubtedly played its worst basketball this week, in the middle of February. So bad, in fact, that former players used social media to question whether this group even cares.

Look, that, too, is going to be a byproduct of this new world in college athletics and it won’t be unique to Kansas: It’s naturally a little easier to get invested in the program when you’ve literally been invested for years, not months, and when you plan to stay invested for years, not months, ahead. (Self downplayed the effort thing when asked, calling it a “focus” issue instead.)

But that’s also not much of an excuse. KU should have veteran leaders, after all.

Theoretically.

“Older team, but team dynamics are totally different every year,” Self said. “Sometimes (with) older teams, you can take things for granted, which I do, too. Are we really that old of a team? Do we really have the leadership that old teams equate to having?

“Just because a team might be full of 32-year-old NFL veterans doesn’t always mean you’ve got the best connection, the best leadership and that stuff. So I think that, from an intangible standpoint, we’re old in age, but we’re not old in some of that other stuff.”

It wasn’t lost on us that the aforementioned mural was draped behind Self as he spoke, displaying such former KU veterans as Ochai Agbaji, Christian Braun, Jalen Wilson and David McCormack. Those guys were here, by the way, with Harris and Adams.

Are KU’s current older players — and I, not Self, mentioned specific names — more accustomed to having elder leaders on the team?

“I think it’s a big-time product of that,” he replied. “I think accepting and moving into different roles isn’t as easy as what it looks from the outside. Sometimes personalities and the way things fit, it’s no one’s fault.

“I think to the point you may be getting at, I think we can get more out of our guys and our veterans than we’re getting — in many ways. I think I can get more in many ways.”

Here’s where it shows up most: A defining characteristic of Self-coached teams is not they they beat you when they’re at their best, but that they win even when they aren’t at their best. They rise to the moment.

“Look at the Chiefs this year,” Self interjected when I brought up this point. “Whenever they don’t play well, they figure it out.”

Precisely.

It became their identity.

It has long been the identity of this KU basketball program, too.

There are — were? — nights when Allen Fieldhouse came alive during a deficit, and KU would take the final four minutes to pack together a snowball and roll it downhill. The momentum felt as unstoppable as it did inevitable.

This year’s team is standing at the bottom of the hill, swallowed by the avalanche. Swallowed by the adversity.

Sometimes, that is. KU does have three wins against top 10 KenPom teams, including No. 1 Duke, which has lost only once since the Jayhawks beat the Blue Devils in November.

Which prompts a story.

A few months back, during his infamous “boot camp,” Self asked his team to complete a running exercise in 17 seconds. Actually, he required his players to complete it in 22 seconds. But if they finished in 17, they could be done for the day.

The last man finished in under 17.

“Y’all shouldn’t have done this,” Self told them. “So now you told me how fast you actually are. Now I know. So anything less is unacceptable.”

That was months ago. His story turned to the present.

“That’s how I feel about this team,” he said.

We’ve seen their ceiling. It can still be elite. It’s in there, somewhere.

We’ve seen their floor, too, and far too frequently.

“The key to a coach isn’t wins and losses,” Self said. “That’s what the keys are to the public. But the key to a coach is how to keep your guys operating as close to their ceiling as consistently as you possibly can.

“There’s still time. But I’ll tell you this: Frustration is an excuse. Everything I could say we’re not doing, or everything the players could say they’re not doing, they’re all excuses. We’ve shown we’re good enough to do it. Let’s go out and freaking do it.”

©2025 The Kansas City Star. Visit kansascity.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.