This year's Sports Illustrated March Madness cover.

If you’re the type that believes in the Sports Illustrated cover jinx, the magazine did you a favor this week.

Instead of featuring one player or one team on its annual March Madness cover, SI went back to its old iconic days of the tournament edition and put representatives from every team that made the tournament onto the cover.

Kansas, of course, is included in the mix, with senior guard Frank Mason III prominently displayed as one of the focal points of the cover. Mason, high center, is joined by one player from the other three No. 1 seeds in this year’s tournament as being a little larger than life.

That’s a good way to go about it if you’re Sports Illustrated because now nobody can claim they were the victim of the cover jinx. Well, nobody and everybody at the same time.

Joining the athletes themselves on this year’s cover are coaches, mascots, women’s players and women’s coaches. Heck, even popular halftime act Red Panda made it onto the cover. Let’s hope that’s not a jinx for her.

I haven’t devoured every inch of it yet, but from what I can tell, Mason is the only Jayhawk represented on the cover.

Kansas, seeded No. 1 in the Midwest, will open NCAA Tournament play at 5:50 p.m. Friday in Tulsa, Okla., against the winner of Wednesday’s First Four game in Dayton, Ohio, between North Carolina Central and UC Davis.

I’m not sure if Seth Davis’ picks are the same that appear in the magazine. We’ll find out later this week. But Davis picks Kansas, UCLA, Gonzaga and Duke as his Final Four.