photo by: AP Photo/Jeff Dean

Kansas' Shakeel Moore, left, celebrates with teammate KJ Adams Jr. during the second half of an NCAA college basketball game against Cincinnati, Saturday, Jan. 11, 2025, in Cincinnati.

Cincinnati — Kansas coach Bill Self received a text message during the week that proved prescient ahead of Saturday’s game at Cincinnati. It told him, “​​You win the fight, you usually win the game.”

Or, put another way, as Self said in a paraphrase of George Bernard Shaw, “You wrestle with the pig, you get muddy, but they like it.”

“And we need to be one of those teams that like it,” Self added. “And right now, we’re kind of in that mode.”

The Jayhawks displayed a complete and total willingness to get dirty on Saturday. They posted their lowest point total of the season, yet still won by double digits, 54-40, because they simultaneously held Cincinnati its lowest point total in 32 years.

Dickinson was the only double-digit scorer and plenty of Jayhawks had forgettable games on the offensive end — David Coit, Dajuan Harris Jr., Rylan Griffen, AJ Storr and still others. KU went 2-for-21 from deep as a team. And yet…

“You look at it individually and say that wasn’t very good,” Self said. “You look at it from a team standpoint defensively and being connected — that was pretty darn good.”

“We were struggling to score,” center Hunter Dickinson added. “Let’s keep it real, we were struggling to score. But we made them play worse than us and that’s sometimes what you got to do out there defensively.”

Part of why the game was so ugly: Both teams also played defense virtually unburdened by the general concept of a foul, making for a physical matchup inside as officials Doug Sirmons, Ray Natili and Gary Maxwell called a combined 12 fouls on the day and allowed for just seven free throws in all.

“Something we’re not used to,” KU guard Zeke Mayo said. “Definitely didn’t get a bunch of whistles tonight. I mean, both teams didn’t.”

In a sense, Mayo added, that worked to KU’s advantage from a pace-of-play perspective, because the Jayhawks could get out in transition more in an “up-and-down game.” The nine fast-break points for KU, most notably two on an alley-oop from Mayo to Shakeel Moore in the second half, were a veritable avalanche by the low-scoring standards of Saturday’s game.

Meanwhile, bad things happened for the Bearcats as they tried to run their elaborate sets in the halfcourt on Saturday. Self credited the work assistant coach Joe Dooley did with the scouting report for aiding KU as it did something it hasn’t always done: played “on-point” ball-screen defense.

Possession after possession ticked down into the final moments of the 30-second shot clock — “We didn’t really feel like they were as good when they’re below 10 seconds on the shot clock,” Mayo said — and while UC got some remarkable last-second magic on occasion, such as a step-back 3-pointer by Arrinten Page in the second half that put the Bearcats ahead 31-30 right as KU seemed to be earning momentum, it also finished with a lot of empty trips down the court.

“We kind of had to tighten up, stay connected, communicate,” Mayo said, “and those were the kinds of things that get the job done on the defensive end.”

The result was a vintage Big 12 slugfest, of the sort Self and his staff have won numerous times over the past two decades. And they’ve already won two in a row this year, after holding Arizona State to a 13-point second half on Wednesday and Cincinnati to a 15-point second half on Saturday.

With those experiences in the rearview mirror, KU’s transfers are starting to get a sense of what the conference is like on a game-by-game basis. As guard Shakeel Moore, who played in the ACC and SEC, put it, the Big 12 is just “tougher.”

“It’s a lot of guys that are just mentally tough, physically tough and just all around,” Moore said.

Added fellow transfer AJ Storr: “It was a scrappy game, but those are the games we like to play.”