On Monday like no other, KU’s Bill Self has a garage to clean and perspective to offer
Customarily on this day after Selection Sunday, the head coach of the overall No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament men’s bracket would be in his office. Like his counterparts around the nation, he’d be directly navigating or presiding over a dizzying set of tasks: ongoing mental preparation of his team; practice planning; travel logistics; scouting responsibilities; media requests and more.
But here Kansas coach Bill Self was at home on this particular Monday, just days after he anticipated getting his presumptive top-seeded team ready to play in Omaha this week and Houston the week after with the Final Four in Atlanta a highly credible goal.
Turns out that even the best-laid schemes, including those hard-wired into our very way of life, actually are subject to change.
And that with his office and the entire KU basketball complex on lockdown for sanitization until next week, yet another of the still-unfolding measures to fend off the COVID-19 coronavirus, Self suddenly has some unwelcome time on his hands.
That might be a familiar sensation as we are stranded in a sort of suspended animation even as everything seems to keep shifting all around us.
(It was only last Wednesday that Self was nimbly addressing the seemingly radical notion of the tournament being played with no fans in the stands: “There’s not going to be an asterisk next to it, ‘Well, they played without fans’ in the record books,’” he said then, adding that the circumstances figured to result in the highest television ratings in tournament history.)
Instead, we’re all left trying to reconcile something that ordinarily would feel like a gift … because absolutely nothing is more precious than time.
Which is another way this phenomenon is tilting the world on its axis. We want time, yes, but now we want it to pass.
And how do we pass it?
“Well, I’ve been told I’m going to clean out the garage and my closet,” Self said with a laugh during a conference call, adding, “That’ll take a couple days right there.”
Not to diminish the task at hand, but, more seriously, Self has plenty of other things in mind — including finding the right way to make time his ally and make the most and best of this situation.
While that certainly will evolve, in the foreground is what he called “tons of stuff to do,” whether it’s keeping up with players on their future plans or working with and monitoring their approach to the new online academic realities or studying what changes KU needs to make to its recruiting approach.
And then some.
As a coach, he said, “You hope for the best but … still prepare for the worst.”
Trouble is, it’s too soon to even really know what that means.
But Self, as brilliant a communicator as he is a tactician and motivator, well understands that this moment in time is about much more than how it affects college basketball and his team.
Even as he strives to find the right way to commemorate a team that went 28-3 and was the top contender to win KU’s first national title since 2008 and Self’s second.
“There (are) a ton of things that need to be done short-term and long-term,” he said. “But the one thing that can’t be forgotten is how do you memorialize a season” that he called the best in America.
Considering all the tumultuous subplots of the season, he added, “This team deserves as much credit as any team that I’ve ever coached. And for (that) to kind of get lost (would be) very disappointing.”
But most successful coaches are good at observing and conveying life lessons even in real time, and Self was quick to answer when asked what he might draw from this situation.
“One lesson is … no matter what we’ve got going on, or no matter who we think we are, there’s always something more important ... that’s actually taking place (than) what we’re doing,” he said. “To me, one life lesson is everything is relative. …
“Sometimes we get caught up in our own world so much that we think that what we’re doing is actually more important and affects more people than what it actually does.”
With that, though, Self pivoted to a point that’s counterintuitive unless you’ve been closely following how the sports world was at the forefront of the groundswell last week that led to massive shutdowns of our ways of life for the greater good.
“How big a positive was it that Rudy Gobert (of the NBA’s Utah Jazz) tested positive?” Self said.
The “accidental hero” who tested positive for the virus on Wednesday and was known to have recklessly touched the property of teammates and media members inadvertently triggered a movement of epic proportions within 24 hours — including the cancellation of the men’s and women’s NCAA Tournaments.
A day after that, a national emergency was declared that has since morphed into mass closures of institutions around the nation in hopes of flattening the curve of the outbreak to slow the spread and give our hospital system a chance to cope.
We can only learn over time to what extent those measures made a difference. But it’s certainly evident already that weeks, or even days, longer without dramatic action would have created exponentially more damage.
“I do think that that could be a positive that came out of this,” Self said. “And a very big one.”
Self also noted how sorry he feels for all the local businesses and employees of local businesses, wondering, “How do they keep their doors open?”
Speaking on a bizarre day with the doors shut even at his own office, with a garage and closet to be cleaned at home, wondering like everyone else when we will return to some sense of normalcy.
This story was originally published March 16, 2020 at 5:40 PM with the headline "On Monday like no other, KU’s Bill Self has a garage to clean and perspective to offer."