Kansas coach Bill Self and the Jayhawks bench watch the closing minutes of the Jayhawks 74-63 loss to the Mountaineers at the WVU Colliseum in Morgantown, W.V. Tuesday.

West Virginia was on a mission, Kansas in a fog. That made me wonder if the time had come for Kansas to make a change for the sake of change. Time to shift to a zone defense, just to make the Mountaineers engage the brakes, think, retool.

I wondered if the same thought had come across the minds of the coaching staff.

“We talked as a staff afterwards, should we have played our crappy 2-3 zone for a brief minute?” KU head coach Bill Self said Thursday, two days after a 74-63 loss in Morgantown. “I almost think — obviously, we wanted to win the game — but if it’s the last game of the season, then maybe you do that. I really didn’t want to bail our players out by telling them, ‘OK, let’s try something different.’ I wanted them to guard their guards and keep the ball in front of them and we couldn’t do that.”

An inability to keep Denzel Valentine in front of them also cost the Jayhawks against Michigan State.

Counting all opponents, Kansas ranks fourth in the nation in defensive efficiency, per advanced-statistics website kenpom.com.

“We haven’t spent any time on zone the last two or three weeks, so I just didn’t feel comfortable going to it,” Self said. “I felt our best chance was to guard them and our best chance to rebound obviously was playing man. I thought that gave us the best chance.”

The 22 turnovers ranked at the top of causes of KU’s second loss, but it wasn’t the only area of concern revealed in Morgantown.

Lateral quickness and speed running the floor are two different areas of athletic ability and Kansas is better at the former than the latter.

Self has used an 11-man rotation this season and seven of them look more athletic running the floor than sliding their feet on defense: Carlton Bragg, Cheick Diallo, Brannen Greene, Landen Lucas, Hunter Mickelson, Svi Mykhailiuk and Wayne Selden.

It will take some creativity to camouflage those vulnerabilities against quick teams and showing a little zone here and there might help.

“People look at us and say, ‘So quick,’ because we can get up and down the court really well, but you take away transition and then it becomes a half-court game and quickness is more defined by what you can do sliding your feet,” Self said.

Paring the rotation from 11 to nine and significantly expanding Carlton Bragg’s minutes also are options worth considering as Kansas works its way through its schedule, which can best be described as a high-hurdles race.

— Tom Keegan appears

on The Drive, Sunday

nights on WIBW-TV