KU basketball coach Bill Self praises fans for showing up on bitterly cold evening
.JPG "Kansas coach Bill Self yells to his team during the first half against Harvard on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022, in Lawrence, Kan.")
Kansas on a bitterly cold winter evening filled nearly every seat in 16,300-seat Allen Fieldhouse for Thursday night’s nonconference men’s basketball game against Harvard.
Just three rows of seats in the northwest corner of the building, and perhaps a few seats in the southwest rafters as well, went unused.
On Saturday, with weather not a factor, there were eight to 10 rows of empty seats in the northwest rafters for KU’s game against Indiana.
The northwest rafters are typically occupied by KU students, who completed finals week on Friday. Kansas’ second semester begins Jan. 17.
“Something that helped us (Thursday) is our fan base,” KU coach Bill Self said of the large crowd helping the Jayhawks upend the pesky Crimson (8-5) of the Ivy League, which trailed by just six points with 3:42 to play.
“It was minus-27 degrees when I went downstairs today,” Self added of checking the thermometer. “I don’t know how many we had there. If the place seats 16,300 (all tickets were sold), we had 14,000 in there. It was awesome from that standpoint.”
Self had hoped for a larger crowd against No. 14 Indiana.
On Saturday, he said: “Our players said it coming in the locker room (during warmups): ‘Coach, there’s nobody out there.’ I was like, ‘C’mon.’ They said, ‘No, nobody’s out there.’
“The way you can tell if our building is juiced is if the corners are full,” Self added Saturday. “That’s how you tell. That’s what I always ask. Whenever our coaches come in (after warmups), I say, ‘Are the corners full?’ (They’ll say) … ‘Eh, it’s getting there.’ Today it was like, ‘No, it’s bare (up there).’ I was like, ‘(Darn).’”
On Saturday, “they (ticket officials) told me they allow for 2,500 students and based on the pickups that’s what they anticipated,” Self said, “and only 1,300 came.”
Self said that despite the good crowd Thursday, the Jayhawk players “were not as turned up tonight. Our energy level was not as good.”
He continued.
“We’re not going to be turned up every game,” Self said. “There’s national championship teams that won a lot of ugly games and this wasn’t one of those (totally ugly) games. I don’t want to make something out of it. We didn’t play as well. You go back and watch tape, you are missing the exact same shots you’ve been making. I don’t think that constitutes a big difference in how you play.”
This story was originally published December 22, 2022 at 10:37 PM with the headline "KU basketball coach Bill Self praises fans for showing up on bitterly cold evening."
