photo by: AP Photo/Chris Seward

North Carolina guard Kyan Evans, forward Jarin Stevenson, center top, and center Henri Veesaar (13) battle Kansas forward Flory Bidunga, bottom, for a loose ball during the second half of an NCAA college basketball game, Friday, Nov. 7, 2025, in Chapel Hill, N.C.

Chapel Hill, N.C. — Friday night’s venture into Chapel Hill was the first ever for the Kansas men’s basketball program.

It was also the first-ever official road game for KU’s star guard Darryn Peterson, not to mention four other freshmen the Jayhawks are counting on to play, at minimum, rotational roles as part of their 2025-26 campaign.

“We’re going to have a lot of other away games where the crowd’s going to be against us,” said Peterson, who scored 22 points on 8-for-14 shooting — on a night when head coach Bill Self thought he might have needed to attempt 20 or 22 shots to give KU a chance. “So this is me and Bryson (Tiller)’s first time playing in a game like this. I think it’s good for us and something to learn from.”

The Jayhawks, indeed, have a lot of learning to do as a team that returns one contributing player from last season’s roster, and on Friday night they learned the hard way.

KU learned it couldn’t rest on its laurels after building a solid lead (37-29 at the break): “The speech or focus (at halftime) was not to get complacent and I feel like we kind of did that,” said Tiller, the freshman forward. “So again, we just know not to do that next time.”

And once it relinquished that lead and had to play from behind, it learned it couldn’t make up a steadily growing deficit all at once: “After that, we didn’t show much maturity — which, we’re really young,” Self said, “but we didn’t show much maturity and poise when they made their big run.”

As Self took care to point out later in its postgame press conference, it’s quite early. In fact, it’s the earliest KU has lost a game in the overall arc of its season since the Jayhawks dropped their season opener against Gonzaga on Nov. 26, 2020.

“If teams can’t handle adversity on November the eighth, then they’re probably in for a pretty long year,” Self said.

From a season-long point of view, the adversity in question certainly looks a lot smaller, and there’s plenty of time in which to grow and develop for the young Jayhawks — who with their inexperience form a contrast to last year’s team that revolved around fourth-, fifth- and sixth-year seniors. As Peterson put it, the Jayhawks can use their time ahead of Tuesday night’s home date with Texas A&M-Corpus Christi to “go back to the drawing board, watch film, see what we did wrong and try to clean it up and get ready for next game.”

There are, however, some immutable characteristics of KU’s lineup that it’ll have to be able to play around, and that won’t be solved — at least from a pure physical standpoint — by watching film.

The Jayhawks’ starters, at least as they’re listed: 6-foot-4, 6-foot-6, 6-foot-6, 6-foot-7, 6-foot-10. That’s a lot of length at guard. The Tar Heels’ five, however, on Friday were 6-foot-2 and 6-foot-3 in the backcourt, but then 6-foot-10, 6-foot-10 and 7 feet — three of them as tall as KU’s tallest.

The 7-footer Henri Veesaar dunked the ball five times and the 6-foot-10 freshman phenom Caleb Wilson did so four more (both numbers including putbacks). KU, meanwhile, had one dunk as a team, a bit of an aberration for a team whose post offense centers on a constant lob threat in Flory Bidunga.

“We’re not very big, guys,” Self said. “Our standing height is pretty small. We’re 6-8 at center and 6-6 at the power forward, so we got to play bigger than what our height is. We didn’t do that tonight.”

That in turn played a significant role in the Jayhawks losing for the first time this season — something that Self noted comes for every team eventually.

It came for KU in game two this time around.

“We need to learn from it, and it’ll happen to Carolina too,” Self said. “It happens to everybody. We all got to figure it out, try to get better from it.”