Sadler returns to KU men’s basketball staff

Nebraska head coach Doc Sadler screams down his bench in the second half, Saturday, Feb. 6, 2010 at Allen Fieldhouse.

A familiar face has rejoined Kansas men’s basketball ahead of the 2023-24 campaign.

Doc Sadler, a longtime head coach at Arkansas-Fort Smith, UTEP, Nebraska and then Southern Miss, who spent the 2012-13 season as KU’s director of basketball operations, has been hired on again as an analyst, Kansas Athletics announced Wednesday.

The well-traveled Sadler has served 12 additional stints as an assistant of one kind or another, including most recently at a familiar Big 12 Conference foe — last season he served as a special advisor to the head coach at Oklahoma.

Prior to that, the Arkansas native spent three years on staff at Nebraska, where he had a decade earlier guided the Cornhuskers through the tail end of their Big 12 tenure.

On the whole, Division I teams with Sadler as head coach have made six postseason appearances, including an NCAA Tournament trip for UTEP in his first season at the helm of the Miners (2004-05).

The news comes as KU prepares to play its first game in Puerto Rico against a Puerto Rico Select Team on Thursday at 11 a.m. Central Time.