Kansas guard Kevin McCullar Jr. (15) brings down a dunk against Houston during the first half on Saturday, Feb. 3, 2024 at Allen Fieldhouse. Photo by Nick Krug

On a day filled with emotional highs for the Kansas men’s basketball team, a pair of dunks by Kevin McCullar Jr. rose above the rest.

First, the super-senior guard punctuated a dominant KU start when he stepped in front of an ill-advised pass out of the post by Houston’s Joseph Tugler and slapped the ball down the court to set up a throwdown in transition. That boosted the Jayhawks to twice the Cougars’ point total at 30-15 with 7:37 to go in the first half.

Then, after a relatively steady 27 minutes of offense against the nation’s top defense, McCullar soared in for a putback dunk off a Hunter Dickinson miss with 44 seconds remaining to cap off a 78-65 victory Saturday afternoon.

As No. 4 Houston called timeout, KU coach Bill Self raised both fists in jubilation.

It was a celebratory kind of day for the eighth-ranked Jayhawks, who moved to 14-0 in Self’s career when playing a higher-ranked top-10 team at Allen Fieldhouse.

KU led for more than 38 minutes of game time and despite committing 18 turnovers to Houston’s three was in firm control throughout.

“We knew how it was just going to be a battle from the beginning, and I think we did a really good job of setting the tone early,” freshman guard Johnny Furphy said. “But yeah, they’re definitely a really good side, a really tough, physical team.”

The Jayhawks only wavered when Houston guard LJ Cryer (formerly of Baylor) got hot and scored 18 of Houston’s points in a row — he had 21 of his 24 points in the second half — but the Cougars never trimmed the margin to single digits. Emanuel Sharp and J’Wan Roberts each had 11 points.

McCullar returned from injury to score 17 points on an efficient 7-for-8 shooting; Furphy matched him with 17 (6-for-7) and added eight rebounds. Dickinson was KU’s leading scorer with 20 points, though he said postgame, “I kind of felt bad because I saw that I was the only one that missed more than a shot.”

The Jayhawks outrebounded Houston 40-24 (more than half of the Cougars’ rebounds were by Roberts). Self said it was a somewhat misleading statistic because KU missed so few shots but acknowledged that his team performed well even so.

“We did a couple box-out drills as a team and so I think that got us pretty ready,” Dickinson said. “We were very prepared. We felt like we needed to match their intensity and I think we did.”

The team shot 68% in the first half and instead of regressing came out and shot 70% in the second.

“We played blindfolded,” Houston coach Kelvin Sampson said, asked about his team’s defensive showing. “A blindfolded person could do better than we did.”

Both teams were intent on pounding the paint from the opening whistle, but KU had far more success in the early going. Dickinson scored thrice despite the attention he received from the Cougars’ big men, and the Jayhawks’ paint touches also helped set up early 3-pointers for McCullar, Dajuan Harris Jr., and then Furphy. They grabbed a 19-10 lead.

A trio of bad-pass turnovers slowed KU down momentarily before KJ Adams (10 points, seven assists, four rebounds) flew in for a dunk to force a Houston timeout at 23-11. At that point, the Jayhawks had missed just one shot (immediately rebounded by Dickinson for a putback).

“I don’t know that I’ve had a team execute better against a defensive team offensively than that first 10 minutes,” Self said. “We were pretty much on point.”

However, KU didn’t make another shot for nearly three and a half minutes, but its fleeting issues coincided with a similar dry spell for Houston, and McCullar brought the crowd to its feet with the first two-handed dunk.

The Cougars responded with back-to-back 3-pointers by Sharp and Cryer, but Furphy hit one of his own to help stem the tide, scored through a foul on a backdoor cut and slammed a ball home in transition for a solo 7-0 run to restore KU’s lead to 37-21.

UH tightened up its vaunted defense as the half approached but let Harris slip through for a layup attempt at the shot-clock buzzer with 1:34 left in the half, one he converted despite losing control of the ball on the way up. KU was able to go into the half with a 43-28 lead against a team that was only giving up 53 points per game.

The Jayhawks gave up an open 3-pointer to Cryer and a slightly less open one to Sharp early in the second half, but the Cougars’ momentum was short-lived as they gave up an alley-oop from Elmarko Jackson to Adams and then committed a shot-clock violation. KU promptly extended its lead to 20, its largest yet, on a Dickinson hook shot.

That margin didn’t last long and Self was forced to call timeout with 9:07 to go after back-to-back Jackson turnovers led to back-to-back Cryer 3s in transition.

Cryer caught fire to an unthinkable degree but Parker Braun provided five crucial points off the bench for KU with its offense struggling, including a rare 3.

“That was at a critical point in the game,” Furphy said. “That was a great way to step up and hit a shot. Big time.”

McCullar made a backdoor layup with just under two minutes to make it 76-63 and essentially sealed the deal.

The Jayhawks, back in the thick of the Big 12 Conference title race at 6-3 in the league, will be back in action for the Sunflower Showdown in Manhattan Monday at 8 p.m.

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