It’s a mass exodus at Kansas basketball. Is it time to worry?
The chaos began in the middle of March, officially anyway with a wink, and by the end of the month, more than 1,700 men’s basketball players put their Name, Image and Likeness into the NCAA transfer portal.
1,700.
The relevancy here will be a much different but related number: six.
Those are the now-former, or very possibly former, Kansas Jayhawks among the crowd of 1,700 — a mass exodus from Lawrence that, if nothing else, provides the appearance of a jolt to a blue-blood program.
And?
The problem?
I’ve heard the alarm and sensed the panic about the week in Lawrence, and we all can recognize the contrast of players lining up at the door to exit Allen Fieldhouse rather than enter. It’s going to take some getting used to.
But we just saw the worst-performing Bill Self team in his 22 seasons at Kansas. Are we supposed to be alarmed that team is falling apart?
This is what KU itself should have outright sought: a complete roster teardown.
The quote-unquote offseason will not be graded by the teardown but rather on what comes next: a rebuild.
The KU roster is in dire need of one, and for once the breaks of this whole new world of building a roster falls in their favor — because the spotlight doesn’t shine on the exodus for long but instead on the opportunity it presents.
It’s there.
KU doesn’t owe a thing to any single player next season, and that alone should be a liberating thought. Would anyone have complained, in retrospect, if Kansas had endured a complete reset a year ago? Then why now?
What’s happening in Lawrence is the necessary prerequisite for a reboot, even if that prerequisite scooped up a player or two they should have preferred to see stay. (Yes, if big man Flory Bidunga follows through on a transfer, and that’s still an “if” per the reporting of The Star’s Shreyas Laddha, that would be a real loss.)
Truly, I’m not attempting to sugarcoat an unsettling development on its surface, because the reboot must still follow. And with a roster only literally yet deep enough to fill out a starting-five, we haven’t a clue whether the reboot will come to fruition.
But the evidence is everywhere beneath that surface, and most notably in San Antonio, where four No. 1 seeds will convene in the Final Four for just the second time since they began seeding the teams in 1979.
Duke is the favorite to win the national championship at the Alamodome in Texas. The Blue Devils have eight players averaging more than 14 minutes per game this season. You know how many of those eight were on Duke’s team last year? One.
A year ago, at this very time, the Duke roster embraced a turnover. A reboot, you might even call it.
By the way, Florida’s top-three scorers are transfers. Only one of Auburn’s top-five scorers started at the school, and he’s a freshman.
That’s the way it works now. All these Final Four teams have seen players leave to make room for fresher waves. Heck, Missouri’s most productive player on a rejuvenated team, Mark Mitchell, played at Duke the past two years. He started 67 games there. Duke lost a really good player.
But that’s not the story in Durham, North Carolina anymore, because they were good enough to divert the attention of the story elsewhere.
To the incoming players.
That’s where we can direct that spotlight at KU now: What comes next?
Those Final Four teams weren’t immune to the effects of the transfer portal. To the contrary, they embraced it. They hit on it. And they didn’t just find pieces — they found pieces that fit together.
The Jayhawks have a heck of player coming to town next season in freshman Darryn Peterson, an alpha combo guard who will provide a jolt of a different kind. He was named the co-MVP of the McDonald’s All-America Game just this week.
Self knows the player he’s building around. It’s a terrific starting piece. The success of the offseason is dependent on how well he builds around him.
There are some lessons to follow on that path, and Kansas doesn’t even need to leave its own building to find the breadcrumbs.
Sure, you can point toward the lessons of the last two years for what didn’t work in Lawrence. But you could also point to two years earlier for a recent example of what did. The best version of the Jayhawks we’ve seen recently — the national championship version — could spread it out and put four players on the floor capable of hitting a 3-point shot.
The arc has consumed the NBA and college game alike, in terms of volume, efficiency, a willingness to commit to it and the quantity of players sharing the floor who have the ability to commit to it. KU inexplicably built a team to juxtapose that popularity of the last two years, preserving a lineup that included Hunter Dickinson, KJ Adams and Dajuan Harris.
They have to reverse course, and there’s a pool 1,700 to help them reverse it. If last year told them anything, prioritizing the style of play isn’t built on the role players — it’s built with the core.
Building a roster is more than stacking together numbers that look good on a stat sheet. The pieces need to mesh, and they quite evidently didn’t this year.
For two decades, Self has thrived on teaching players his system, his plays, his preferences. It’s one of his Hall of Fame qualities. The players buy in, get better, and then gradually advance to bigger roles. The team gets better as a result. It’s been a convenient cycle, and for 22 years it didn’t even include a blip.
But there is no gradual anymore. You don’t have years to make everything fit. You have months.
And just weeks to find the players to do it.
They just need to find a lot more now.
This story was originally published April 4, 2025 at 5:30 AM with the headline "It’s a mass exodus at Kansas basketball. Is it time to worry?."