photo by: AP Photo/Chris Seward

Kansas center Paul Mbiya (34) talks with head coach Bill Self during the second half of an NCAA college basketball game against North Carolina, Friday, Nov. 7, 2025, in Chapel Hill, N.C.

Freshman center Paul Mbiya hasn’t played much for Kansas this year, but he played a very important one and one-tenth seconds last Saturday when the Jayhawks beat N.C. State on the road.

Mbiya, a 7-footer with a 7-foot-8 wingspan, entered in a one-point game in overtime and was charged with making it as difficult as possible for Wolfpack guard Quadir Copeland to throw a lob pass off an inbound, as head coach Bill Self explained postgame. He did his job, as Copeland took about four seconds and settled for a 3-point attempt for Darrion Williams, which sailed wide to seal the Jayhawks’ victory.

“It was exciting,” Mbiya said in a pregame radio interview with KU broadcaster Brian Hanni on Tuesday night. “I was excited to go back there and play against them. They was talking trash to me, so I was like, OK, check into the game. So I was just enjoying the moment, and we get a W, so I was really happy for that.”

It’s not hard to figure out why the fans at the Lenovo Center were talking trash to the Jayhawks’ reserve center. He had signed with N.C. State after averaging a double-double in the French under-21 league. Then, as Self put it in a recent radio interview of his own, “They had some things happen from an NIL standpoint where he needed to look elsewhere.”

And so Mbiya signed with KU instead on June 25, adding depth (and length) to a frontcourt headlined by Flory Bidunga, Bryson Tiller and Tre White.

Originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo like Bidunga, Mbiya is taking his time easing into college basketball. He’s appeared in nine games but played four minutes or fewer in seven of them.

Like many of the Jayhawks’ reserves, he hasn’t received as much time on the floor as he would in most years because of KU’s highly challenging nonconference schedule. KU is primarily deploying him as a big body to alter shots and grab rebounds — primarily when Bidunga and Tiller are in foul trouble — and he’s had varying levels of success in doing so to this point.

He did score the go-ahead bucket in the Jayhawks’ big win over Tennessee in Las Vegas on Nov. 26 when he picked up a fumble by Melvin Council Jr. and dropped in a layup for his first career field goal, and he banked in a hook shot for his second in Tuesday’s blowout win over Towson.

Off the court, he said in the radio interview, he’s enjoying being a Jayhawk.

“You can really, really focus on the basketball,” he said. “My friends, I got Flory, my boy that speak French, and then Gee (Ngala). I was feeling at home already, you know? Coach Bill Self is like a father figure for me, so I was feeling (at) home.”

French is Mbiya’s first language — he also speaks Lingala, Swahili and English — and he has it in common with Bidunga, his fellow Congolese forward, and Ngala, the veteran guard from Montreal, Canada. Bidunga joked prior to the season that they had been talking trash in French to Self “and he doesn’t even know, so it’s pretty good.”

Both Mbiya and Bidunga are from Kinshasa, although they didn’t know each other before meeting in Lawrence: “That’s actually interesting, I never met Paul before, but yeah I was excited to have somebody from actually the same city as me coming to Kansas,” Bidunga said. (It does have a population of about 18 million.)

Another thing they have in common is that they both played soccer growing up. Bidunga actually did so even when he was at Kokomo High School in Indiana. Mbiya, for his part, said he played primarily as a No. 9, or striker. He’s only in his fourth year of playing basketball after he started at 17 years old with the NBA Academy in Senegal. Now he’s working to develop a greater understanding of the game.

“I was working on improving my shooting,” Mbiya said. “I was working on getting better. It’s a process, so we just keep going.”

Bidunga, speaking in the preseason, noted that he had also been playing in a different style, given that he was in Europe, “but so far since he’s been here, he’s really progressing, it’s improving, it’s crazy.”