Big 12 teams thriving at home

KU, OSU, Texas Tech lone league schools above .500 on road

Just three men’s basketball teams in the Big 12 Conference have won more league road games than they’ve lost this season.

First-place Kansas University holds a 5-1 mark outside of Allen Fieldhouse, while Oklahoma State is 4-2 and Texas Tech is 3-2.

A look at the teams with losing league road records — in order: Oklahoma (2-3), Texas (1-4), Iowa State (2-3), Texas A&M (0-5), Colorado (2-4), Nebraska (2-4), Missouri (0-5), Kansas State (1-5) and Baylor (0-6) — and it’s obvious some players prefer sleeping in their own beds instead of hotel accommodations.

“I would say homecourt (advantage) in this league is 8-10 points, close to that,” KU coach Bill Self said.

Self said he hopes the Allen Fieldhouse homecourt advantage remains at least that strong Saturday when the Jayhawks (20-2, 10-1) take on Iowa State (14-8, 6-5) in a noon tip.

“Our crowd has been fantastic,” Self said, adding, “our homecourt needs to be the best it has all year for these last three games.”

The Jayhawks, who will play host to Oklahoma State on Feb. 27 and Kansas State on March 2, lead OSU by just one game in the league standings.

“With a two-game lead, we had a little cushion,” Self said. “We’ve got no cushion now.”

KU now needs to take care of business at home while trying also to claw out road wins at Oklahoma (Feb. 21) and Missouri (March 6) if this year’s senior class wants to claim its third conference crown.

“If you told us before conference play started we’d be 10-1 now and three of our five left were at home, you’d think that was not a bad position to be in,” Self said. “The unfortunate thing is we were 10-0 and had a chance to be 11-0.

“The biggest thing for me is to think our fans should savor the opportunity to watch our seniors play and be excited. There’s only three more chances to get in the building to watch them play.”

The Jayhawks may need all the help they can get from the fans Saturday, considering ISU carries a six-game winning streak into Allen.

“We feel like we have a great chance to win anywhere,” freshman Tasheed Carr told the Ames (Iowa) Tribune. “As a team, we feel like we can go down to Lawrence and win that game. We just have to pay attention to practice and get better every day.”

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High-low lives on: While it might seem that the Jayhawks have scrapped Self’s trademark high-low offense, KU’s coach said that’s not the case.

“We’re running quite a bit of it. Probably not as much as last year,” Self said. “When we lost Wayne (Simien because of an injury earlier this year) we went in kind of a ball screen mode to try to take advantage of Keith (Langford) and Aaron (Miles) spotting up. It was fairly good to us.

“We won some games with it, now we are doing a combination of both.”

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Zone vs. man: The Jayhawks have been using quite a bit of zone lately, including the last six minutes of regulation and both overtimes Monday at Texas Tech.

“I would say situation, opponent, personnel that’s in the game,” Self said, asked when he will use the scheme. “It can disrupt rhythm and make for long possessions, which, if you have a lead, that’s pretty important.”