photo by: AP Photo/David Zalubowski

Kansas head coach Bill Self directs his team against Colorado in the first half of an NCAA college basketball game Monday, Feb. 24, 2025, in Boulder, Colo.

Back-to-back losses on a disastrous road trip in mid-February sent the Kansas men’s basketball team plummeting in national rankings, but the Jayhawks’ much-discussed “new season” mentality in the days since has earned them a pair of wins against Oklahoma State and Colorado.

“I’ve always been taught that (you) don’t let one become two or two become three, and extend positive momentum and limit negative momentum,” KU coach Bill Self said on his “Hawk Talk” radio show on Wednesday. “Well, I think that’s what the guys are doing — even though we waited too long, I think that’s what the guys are doing in a very good way.

“You can’t ask anybody on our team what our record is in league, because they’re just going to tell you it’s 2-0. And I think that’s a positive thing.”

They have a chance to extend it to 3-0 on Saturday, but the degree of difficulty is increasing substantially as KU welcomes Texas Tech, one of the top teams in the Big 12, to Allen Fieldhouse for a Saturday afternoon showdown.

It’s the start of a challenging stretch to conclude conference play that pits the Jayhawks against the top three teams in the league at this juncture: third-place Tech, second-place Arizona and first-place Houston.

“That’s what has to happen, because in the tournament, we’re going to be playing teams like this too,” junior guard Rylan Griffen said. “We have to be able to compete with these teams and string together multiple wins in a row because that’s something that, in the tournament, you have to do to go deep. So this is like a mini-tournament for us, trying to win all these games right now, end the season great and end the season undefeated.”

Texas Tech owns the only Big 12 victory over Houston — in a game that featured ejections for head coach Grant McCasland and forward JT Toppin — but more recently the Red Raiders lost 69-61 to the Cougars in a rematch at United Supermarkets Arena on Monday. Tech used just six players due to recent lower-body injuries to a pair of key starters, guard Chance McMillian and forward Darrion Williams.

On Thursday, Tech coach Grant McCasland said neither player had been practicing but that both wanted to play, according to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal.

Last season, Williams — currently Tech’s third-leading scorer — torched KU for 30 points on a perfect 12-for-12 shooting to go with 11 rebounds as the Red Raiders blew out the Jayhawks 79-50. This year, he and McMillian trail the sophomore New Mexico transfer Toppin, who has racked up 16.6 points per game on 54.7% shooting and 8.4 boards in league play, on the stat sheet.

McMillian (33-for-83, 39.8%), freshman reserve Christian Anderson (34-for-84, 40.5%) and Minnesota transfer Elijah Hawkins (32-for-92, 34.8%) are high-volume long-range shooters for Tech, which leads the Big 12 in attempts from beyond the arc since the start of league play while converting at the third-best percentage.

Hawkins sits atop the conference in assists with seven per game, and is by far the biggest reason why Tech leads the league in assist-to-turnover ratio.

“The roster impresses me a lot,” Self said on Thursday. “I think they had a good roster last year and they certainly added to it. (They have) quickness at the guard spots, and they play to mismatches as well as anybody in our league. They’re a good team.”

The Red Raiders typically start guards Hawkins, McMillian and Kerwin Walton with Williams and Toppin, but in the loss to Houston inserted Anderson, who played a career-high 40 minutes, and 6-foot-11 forward Federiko Federiko (4.7 points and 5.1 rebounds per game).

“It’s going to be an uptempo game, up and down, they take a lot of early shots in the shot clock, they get to the boards, they’re active,” Griffen said. “You know why they’re a good team by just watching them.”

Tech ranks No. 10 in the nation after having entered the AP Top 25 for the first time this year on Jan. 27. The Red Raiders haven’t been in their strongest form of the year, having split their last six games, including a 111-106 double-overtime victory against Arizona State on Feb. 12 and a surprising 69-66 loss at TCU six days later.

KU, which recently dropped out of the rankings entirely for the first time in four years, had been nearly perfect against higher-ranked top-10 teams at Allen Fieldhouse under Bill Self before its shocking double-overtime loss to Houston on Jan. 25. The Jayhawks recorded another victory over a higher-rated foe soon afterward when they beat Iowa State on Feb. 3 and will have a chance for one more on Saturday.

“We need to get some momentum by playing against the best going into the postseason,” Self said.

Kansas Jayhawks (19-9, 10-7 Big 12) vs. No. 10 Texas Tech Red Raiders (21-7, 12-5 Big 12)

• Allen Fieldhouse, Lawrence, 1 p.m.

• Broadcast: ESPN

• Radio: Jayhawk Radio Network (in Lawrence, KLWN AM 1320 / K269GB FM 101.7 / KMXN FM 92.9)

Keep an eye out

Scoring in bunches: KU showed it can function as a prolific outside-shooting team when it went 14-for-30 (46.7%) from deep in Saturday’s victory over Oklahoma State, making its highest quantity of 3-pointers since Feb. 22, 2022. The Jayhawks promptly turned around and went 3-for-13 (23.1%) at Colorado, their lowest number of attempts all year and second-lowest number of field goals. As Self put it on “Hawk Talk,” “You got to be able to run average to bad offense sometimes and come away with three points,” and that holds true in particular against a prolific shooting team like Tech.

Post presence: The gaps between dominant Hunter Dickinson scoring performances have been pretty large this season. After Dickinson’s 28-point, 12-rebound double-double against Michigan State in November, one of the best showings of his career, he didn’t score 20 points again for a month. He cleared that mark three times in a four-game stretch midway through conference play but then proceeded to play some of his worst games as a Jayhawk in Utah. Dickinson bounced back big-time with a KU-career-high 32 points at Colorado, very much needed in a game where the Jayhawks got little else going. Self said he believes Dickinson can continue to improve his production by playing closer to the basket: “Hunter is a good mid-range shooter. But he’s played to that too much this year, in my opinion, and that’s our fault too.”

Aberration: It might come as a surprise, but KU leads the Big 12 in defensive rebounds per game in conference play and is fifth among the league’s 16 teams in rebounding margin. Yet the Jayhawks have put themselves in jeopardy in games at Utah (an eventual loss) and Colorado (an eventual win) by allowing copious offensive boards to opposing big men. On Monday, Jayhawks not named Dickinson combined for 19 rebounds and KU got outrebounded 46-31 overall. Tech is solid on the offensive glass and the prospect of giving up second-chance 3-pointers to the Red Raiders should be enough to scare the Jayhawks into playing a better game in that realm.

Off-kilter observation

Hawkins started a first-round NCAA Tournament game against KU in 2023 when he was a sophomore at Howard. He finished with 12 points and eight assists with seven turnovers in the Bison’s 96-68 loss.