photo by: AP Photo/Rob Gray

BYU forward Richie Saunders blocks the shot of Kansas forward KJ Adams Jr. (24) during the second half of an NCAA college basketball game Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2025, in Provo, Utah.

Provo, Utah — Kansas’ two-game road swing through Utah began with optimism, as head coach Bill Self believed the trip could bring the Jayhawks together like a November multi-team event — something this year’s team didn’t get — usually does.

It ended with the Jayhawks two losses worse, with another unsuccessful starting lineup in the rearview mirror, poised to drop out of the AP Top 25 for the first time in four seasons and, to hear Self tell it, needing to “get away from each other for a day” after an unsuccessful attempt at team bonding.

In between, KU didn’t lead for a single second in games against Utah on Saturday or BYU on Tuesday.

“A lot of times with teams, there needs to be something (to) happen to pull everybody together that is us against the outside,” Self said on Tuesday. “We’re going to have an opportunity to do that for sure. So a lot of teams go through it, we just haven’t been through it much at all in a long time, but certainly we’re going to go through it this time.”

KU, which is now 17-9 and 8-7 in Big 12 play, couldn’t have asked for much more adversity than it is now facing.

The Jayhawks’ resounding 91-57 loss to the Cougars at the Marriott Center matched the largest margin of defeat since Self took over as head coach; that also makes it his worst loss in conference play, beating out a pair of blowouts at Texas Tech and Houston last season.

The two defeats were shocking developments for a team that was once ranked No. 1 in the AP poll and beat Duke on a neutral court in November.

“Certainly, we got some things we got to work through,” Self said on postgame radio, “because we’re going backwards right now, and it needs to change, and it’s got to change on a dime.”

The us-against-the-world mentality was incipient in Tuesday’s postgame press conference. Center Hunter Dickinson was acutely aware of how the loss to BYU would be perceived on a national scale, stating he expected the Jayhawks to incur a lot of criticism from fans and in the media, “rightfully so, because we just lost by damn near 40, and that’s obviously not Kansas basketball.”

“Nobody’s going to feel bad for us now that NIL’s a thing and players are getting paid, everything like that, nobody’s going to feel bad for you,” Dickinson added. “They’re going to expect you to perform like a paid player, and so that’s kind of what you got to go out there and do. You have a job to do, clearly we didn’t do it, and so there’s going to be repercussions and a lot of flak for that, and rightfully so, we deserve that.”

After both losses, Self was puzzled by his team’s inability to execute simple defensive concepts. After Utah he pointed out that KU messed up a ball-screen coverage on its opening defensive possession, leading to a basket for the Utes; after BYU he noted that the Jayhawks were providing help defense when they were switching all five positions, which simply isn’t done.

“Tonight we were one foot in, one foot out in how we guarded, in a lot of other things, right from the jump,” Self said. “It was crystal clear how we wanted to try to guard them and right from the jump we doubted it and ended up hurting (ourselves), right there early.”

How to explain these seemingly inexplicable results on the court? For Self, the answer lies, in fact, beyond the court.

He said that when KU returns to practice on Thursday, ahead of Saturday’s home date with Oklahoma State, it needs to set about becoming a “more connected and a more intangible-oriented team.”

“Right now, our intangibles are not where they need to be, which leads to looking a step slow, which leads to being on an island, which leads to poor communication, which leads to a lot of different things,” he said on postgame radio.

In keeping with the theme, Dickinson did attribute the number of open looks BYU got from beyond the arc — the Cougars were 10-from-24 in the first half alone — to faulty communication.

“Certainly, we got to tighten that stuff up before we actually say, ‘Well, we’re guarding something wrong, or we’re not running something right,'” Self said. “When you don’t run something, when you’re not connected, it’s never going to look good. So we’ve got to tighten that up first.”