photo by: AP Photo/Eric Gay

Kansas guard Elmarko Jackson (13) scores past Tennessee guard Bishop Boswell (3) during the second half of an NCAA college basketball game in the Players Era tournament in Las Vegas, Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2025.

Las Vegas — Kansas guard Elmarko Jackson had never scored more than 12 points in a game prior to Wednesday.

He had 17 total points through seven games of the 2025-26 season game prior to Wednesday.

And, amid broader struggles with turnovers and general hesitation on offense, he had seen his role dwindle to single-digit minutes in two of his last three appearances prior to Wednesday.

Then he scored 15 points in the second half alone of Wednesday’s Players Era battle with No. 17 Tennessee — 11 of them coming in the span of three minutes as KU cut its deficit from 12 points to five — to lead the Jayhawks to a comeback victory.

The biggest bucket of all might have been when he left five-star freshman Nate Ament flat-footed with a crossover and wiggled around another Volunteer in midair to finish a layup that put the Jayhawks ahead 68-64 with five minutes to go. They didn’t relinquish the lead from there.

“It feels good,” Jackson said. “Coach (Bill Self) has just been harping on us to just keep playing no matter the circumstance. It’s just what we did. I’m just happy to have a group of guys around me that believe in me and trust me to make plays for themselves and me.”

As Self remarked postgame, Jackson’s breakout was all the more remarkable because of what had preceded it — an extremely poor pre-halftime sequence in which his missed transition layup and a bad pass stolen by Jaylen Carey helped turn a one-possession deficit into a seven-point margin at the break. (He did draw a foul and sink a pair of free throws with 16 seconds to go before halftime, perhaps a sign of what was to come.)

“He had about as bad a three-minute stretch the end of the first half as a guy can have,” Self said. “And he flipped it. To me, that shows some toughness and everything.”

The toughness was on full display in the second half, because while Jackson got going at first by making two 3s as part of a solo 8-0 run, he also fought his way to some hard-charging buckets in the paint like the one late — demonstrating the supreme athleticism that was supposed to be his calling card when he came out of high school as a McDonald’s All-American.

He and his backcourt partner Melvin Council Jr. essentially willed KU to the comeback victory by drawing contact at the rim over and over.

“Melvin and Elmarko the last 10 minutes of the game were both pretty damn good,” Self said. “And they got downhill and they got fouled, and that’s something we should be able to play to that we haven’t done a good job of late or up until this point, but hopefully that’ll give us some confidence playing that way later.”

After an up-and-down freshman year in which he was thrust into extended action earlier than expected and never quite settled in, followed by a sophomore year lost altogether to a torn patellar tendon, perhaps Wednesday’s 17 points and four rebounds were “the icebreaker that takes the lid off the cover, so to speak,” as Self put it.

“And maybe he can start playing a little bit freer, because he played free the second half and he hadn’t done that all year long,” Self added.

Jackson got as much playing time on Wednesday as he did initially in large part due to injuries to Darryn Peterson (hamstring) and Jayden Dawson (wrist). But like his classmate Jamari McDowell, who entered the starting lineup on Tuesday and validated Self’s decision with big buckets in each of the last two games, Jackson took full advantage of the circumstances.

“I knew he was due,” McDowell said. “It’s been a while. Just like Coach said in the locker room, we’ve been his two favorite players” — McDowell paused to add some meaningful air quotes — “the past few weeks, so I knew he was due. It was time.”

Besides McDowell, sophomore forward Flory Bidunga is the only Jayhawk on scholarship who has been on the roster with Jackson prior to this season.

“Marko is a hard worker,” Bidunga said. “I’m proud for him. He makes some great plays (in the game), pretty much he carries the team at some points, so I’m very happy for him.”

Indeed, Jackson proved to be a big reason KU emerged from the Players Era with a 3-0 record (and with its players an extra $300,000 richer as a group). As he put it himself postgame, “I feel like having these games without some key players that we have is good for our team development.”

Jackson may have benefited from that development as much as anyone.

“I feel like as a team, this isn’t really no surprise,” Jackson said. “I feel like as basketball players, especially as a team, you’re supposed to be delusional about how you guys are. And you know, it feels good to know that we’re good about the delusion that we have about this team. I feel like we fight hard, and I feel like we’d go toe-to-toe with any team in the NCAA.”