Kansas head coach Bill Self talks with media members following the NCAA selection show on Sunday, March 12, 2017 at Allen Fieldhouse. The Jayhawks received a number one seed in the Midwest Regional and will play the winner of the NC Central and UC Davis First Four game in Tulsa.

Winning 600-plus games, 13 consecutive conference championships and reaching the Elite Eight or beyond in eight of your 22 seasons as a college basketball coach will get you to the brink of the Hall of Fame.

But it won’t provide any special advantages when it comes to the annual NCAA Tournament.

Kansas coach Bill Self does not know how the Midwest region is going to shake out. In that way, he’s just like me or you. It could play to chalk, with the higher seed advancing each time, or wind up as that one wild and crazy region that receives the red-marker treatment on brackets across America.

What Self does know, however, is that his top-seeded Jayhawks, provided they advance, will find comfort in the fact that a couple of big-name programs potentially await in the second round.

“What is immediately in front of us are Power Five conference teams,” said Self, using more of a football term to describe college basketball’s most popular conferences. “We’ve obviously lost different ways in the tournament. But you think about it, and you say, well, the Missouri Valley (Conference) has been a thorn in your side or Bucknell. The fact of the matter is the first (opponent) isn’t as well known, obviously. But if you’re fortunate enough to advance, you’re going to be playing people that obviously are well known, and players will recognize names on the other teams and that kind of stuff.”

The Jayhawks (28-4) on Friday will face the winner of Wednesday night’s First Four matchup between North Carolina Central and UC Davis. A win there would move Kansas into the second round, where it would face the winner of Friday’s 8-9 game between Miami, Fla., and Michigan State. That would put the Jayhawks into a position very similar to the one they faced last season, when they took on UConn — a program had won a national title as recently as 2014 and two this decade — in the second round in Des Moines, Iowa.

Gone are the days of the second-round matchup against the 8-9 winner being another relatively easy game for the No. 1 seed. In to replace them are bona fide battles that look awfully intimidating on paper.

Tom Izzo and Michigan State have reached seven Final Fours and won one national title. Jim Larranaga and Miami have wins this season over No. 1 seed North Carolina, No. 2 seed Duke and at No. 5 seed Virginia and reached the Big Dance through the juggernaut that is the ACC.

Both are in the same mold as that UConn team KU faced a season ago, and both will — and already do — have KU’s attention.

“I think we welcome it,” senior forward Landen Lucas said of potential showdowns with high-profile opponents. “I think it’s good for us because in that 8-9 game to have two teams that have such a big name and great history to them, it’s good for us. I think last year it helped us go out there motivated, ready to go. You could tell in that first half (against Connecticut); we were out there juiced up, ready to go, getting stops. And we should be either way. But it doesn’t hurt at all when you’ve got a big-name team you’re lining up across.”

With those thoughts in mind, Self and the Jayhawks have emphasized all week that they’re not about to take their first-round matchup for granted.

Asked earlier this week if he thought a No. 16 seed ever would beat a No. 1, Self said it was bound to happen.

“Yes, I do,” he said. “I do. I just hope it’s not this year, but I do think it’s gonna happen. You know, you’ve had 15s beat 2s and the difference between a 1 and a 2 is minuscule and the difference between a 15 and a 16 is minuscule. So it’ll happen. But I’m certainly hopeful that that’ll be postponed.”