photo by: AP Photo/L.G. Patterson

Kansas's Hunter Dickinson, top, talks to his team during a timeout in the second half of an NCAA college basketball game against Missouri Sunday, Dec. 8, 2024, in Columbia, Mo. Missouri won 76-67.

Columbia, Mo. — Kansas senior forward KJ Adams put it simply on Sunday after the top-ranked Jayhawks lost their second straight game against an unranked foe: “You either fall behind and lose more games or you build each other back … and turn the season around. It’s not really what Kansas does, lose like this.”

What exactly Kansas does, this season in particular, is still up for debate.

When the Jayhawks outlasted Duke for a 75-72 victory in Las Vegas on Nov. 26, head coach Bill Self said his team had started to form an identity as they “won ugly down the stretch”; they then played some of their best basketball of the year against Furman four days later.

And then that came to a screeching halt KU fell flat twice in a five-day span, leading for a combined 17 seconds in 80 minutes of game time between games at Creighton and Missouri and, in particular, posting one of the program’ worst halves of basketball in recent history to open what became a 76-67 loss to the rival Tigers.

“We haven’t been any good at all the last five days,” Self said. “I don’t know that we’re close to finding (an) identity yet. Because who are we? Are we a skilled team? Are we an athletic team? Are we an execution team? What do we really hang our hat on? Are we a toughness team? Do we make people play bad?

“I’ll be honest with you, I think right now we’re kind of in a situation that it’d be hard for me to say from game to game what we are.”

It’s not just Self in the dark on this front. Guard David Coit said, “Our identity as a team, I don’t know what that is,” as teammate Adams chimed in, “We haven’t figured that out yet.” If the Jayhawks don’t get it, Self added, “it won’t be a fun year.”

Many of the characteristics Self cited as possibilities are apparent, at least in theory, in this year’s team. For example, in the Duke and Furman games, KU showed a level of connectedness on defense, spearheaded by players like Harris and Adams but aided by the rest of its transfer-laden roster, that vexed its opponents — indeed, it made people play bad.

That trait didn’t manifest itself much on Sunday, at least for the first 25 minutes. As Self put it, the Jayhawks’ small-ball lineup (a first-time group of Adams, Coit, Dajuan Harris Jr., Zeke Mayo and Hunter Dickinson) looked slow defending Tamar Bates and the Tigers, and only scored three points off five turnovers while committing 15 of its own.

In that lineup change lies perhaps one key element of KU’s search for an identity: its search for key contributors.

AJ Storr, a recent insertion into the starting lineup for three games who had arrived as a highly touted transfer from Wisconsin, didn’t start and in 18 minutes went 1-for-7 with two points and three rebounds. Rylan Griffen, who had previously started over Storr, returned to action after missing the Creighton loss with the flu and scored three points in 12 minutes.

Self has frequently spoken about the ongoing adjustment process for these players. But on Sunday, asked about Storr, he didn’t want to single out a particular player’s performance and added, “I don’t think there’s anybody that’s close to getting to what I would envision as being a team.”

While he continues to reshape it, though, Self does have his own idea of how the lineup could look.

“I know who should be our starters in theory,” he said. “But it hasn’t translated from practice to games or anything else like that yet. So we’ll just have to hang in there and see if we can develop that. Because at this time, I don’t feel great about that.”

Even as he and Adams questioned their identity, Coit expressed hope the Jayhawks could nail it down soon — maybe even as soon as Saturday against N.C. State.

“I bet you we’ll figure it out this week,” he said.