ESPN basketball experts like KU’s chances of winning Big 12, contending for NCAA title
An ESPN.com panel agrees with the Big 12 men’s basketball coaches who last week chose Kansas as the preseason favorite to win the 2021-22 regular-season conference title.
Jeff Borzello, Joe Lunardi, Myron Medcalf and John Gasaway each identified KU as their choice to snare the league championship in an article published Tuesday. Texas was the pick of the panel to finish second, followed by Baylor, Oklahoma State, Texas Tech, West Virginia, Oklahoma, TCU, Kansas State and Iowa State.
“No program in America is as consistently positioned for a Final Four or national championship than the Jayhawks,” wrote Lunardi. His current bracketology has KU earning a No. 1 seed in the 2022 NCAA Tournament with Texas, Gonzaga and UCLA also securing top seeds.
“The bad news about being a No. 1 seed nine times in 18 seasons? Bill Self has only one national championship to show for it. The good news? The best path to being a national champion is to earn a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament. Kansas will very likely be a No. 1 seed again on Selection Sunday, maybe even the top overall seed. The Jayhawks should be on the shortest list of title contenders this year. They are at the top of mine. Probability says they are well overdue for Self’s next (national) title,” Lunardi added.
Winning the Big 12 title alone would be a huge accomplishment in the panel’s eyes. The group says the Big 12 “has arguably the most top-to-bottom talent in the country.”
Lunardi and Gasaway chose KU senior point guard Remy Martin the Big 12’s preseason player of the year. KU’s David McCormack was choice of Borzello and Texas’ Marcus Carr the pick of Medcalf for top player honors.
“Self does his best with experienced teams like this, so I’m optimistic for the Jayhawks,” Borzello wrote.
Noted Gasaway: “You have to like Self’s chances when he has an experienced rotation. Actually, you pretty much have to like Self’s chances anytime, but he will definitely be heard from when guys like (Ochai) Agbaji, McCormack, (Jalen) Wilson and (Christian) Braun are all a year older and better. Now for the gloom and doom! KU was just average on offense in Big 12 play last season. Does that really change so dramatically with maturation and the arrival of Martin? Not to mention losing the team’s only Big 12 all-defensive team performer and a key distributor of the ball (Marcus Garrett) could turn out to be a more significant hit than expected. Be that as it may, I’m sticking with Kansas to win the league.”
KU not only was picked first in the league by the Big 12 coaches last week and ESPN.com’s panel this week, but placed third overall in the AP’s preseason poll behind No. 1 Gonzaga and No. 2 UCLA.
Coach Bill Self is not hiding from the lofty predictions.
“We’ve been picked fairly high most years. I think from a staff standpoint it doesn’t really mean much at all,” Self said last week at Big 12 basketball Media Day at T-Mobile Center. “I would rather be picked high than not picked high. But the reality of it is, right now it’s a coin flip. How do you know how quickly teams with so many newcomers (eight new scholarship players) are going to gel together?
“Everybody to me looks good on paper. We probably look as good as anybody on paper because we’ve returned guys where most of the other programs don’t return as many guys. It doesn’t mean anything to me. I think when you play at Kansas, you coach in this league, pressure is something that is usually good. If you can’t deal with that type of pressure, then you’re probably not going to be able to deal with real pressure later on,” Self added.
Self said his own expectations are the Jayhawks, “should be as good as what our ceiling allows us to be. I don’t have false hopes that we play to a level that basically doesn’t fit what our ceiling is or what our personnel is. That being said I think our ceiling is pretty high. I like our personnel. I think we could be a team if things fall right we could be one of the better teams out there. I also know we’ve got eight newcomers too. So how chemistry and all that stuff plays out remains to be seen,” he added.
KU senior McCormack agrees with those individuals who consider KU an elite team.
“We have a great team this year,” McCormack said. “Expectations don’t change. We have that mindset. The team this year has a standard we hold ourselves to. This is a program of tradition, of history and we hold ourselves to that standard. We won’t expect anything less,” McCormack noted.
This story was originally published October 27, 2021 at 7:03 AM with the headline "ESPN basketball experts like KU’s chances of winning Big 12, contending for NCAA title."
