Kansas guard Elmarko Jackson (13) walks away as the St. John's bench mobs St. John's guard Dylan Darling after Darling’s game-winning bucket with a second remaining on Sunday, March 22, 2026 at Viejas Arena in San Diego. Photo by Nick Krug

SAN DIEGO — Of all the despondent Jayhawks in their locker room at Viejas Arena on Sunday evening, perhaps no one was taking the loss to St. John’s as hard in the minutes afterward as Elmarko Jackson.

The redshirt sophomore guard, subbed in for Kohl Rosario with six seconds remaining, had found himself in on-ball defense against St. John’s point guard Dylan Darling in the final moments. And then, to put it simply, as KU guard Darryn Peterson often does …

“Darling attacked, got the ball up, made the layup,” Peterson said.

Darling, who had been 0-for-4 from the field exclusively on 3-point shots, got a half-step on Jackson on a drive to the rim, tossed up a right-handed layup and scored the basket as time expired to end KU’s season with a 67-65 loss.

“Obviously it wasn’t a very good effort on us the last, what was it, 3.9 (seconds)?” head coach Bill Self said. “We had to guard four bounces, and we didn’t guard four bounces. Yeah, that was really disappointing.”

So there was Jackson half an hour later with his face pressed into a towel, trying to reckon with what had just transpired.

“I can’t even really think right now, to be honest,” he said.

At one point, guard Jayden Dawson — a senior transfer from Loyola-Chicago who had just seen his season end without playing a minute in the lone NCAA Tournament of his career — reached over from his neighboring locker to comfort Jackson.

“I mean, anybody would take that hard,” he told the Journal-World afterward. “I mean, what kind of competitor are you if you don’t take that hard? But I’m just telling him to keep his head up. He got a bright future. I mean, I know he gets a lot of hate and things like that, but Marko, man, he’s one of the best players I’ve ever played with, athletically, physically, he’s just super gifted … Super bright future ahead for him. He got a long ways to go. This is just the start of it, so I mean, it’s nothing.”

Could Jackson and the Jayhawks have perhaps been spared the heartbreak of Darling’s buzzer-beater? As Self pointed out, their execution on defense in the lead-up to the Idaho State transfer’s last-second drive was not quite perfect.

KU, which did not lead at any point after it had been ahead 6-3 in the opening minutes, managed to rally from down 14 with eight minutes to go to tie the game at 65 on two free throws by Darryn Peterson with 14.1 seconds left.

Having only committed two fouls in the preceding 19-plus minutes, the Jayhawks had four to give as they attempted to waste as much time as possible on the Red Storm’s final possession.

“We was supposed to, like, use the time and use our fouls wisely because we only had two fouls,” guard Melvin Council Jr. said.

Rosario committed the first, Tre White committed the second, Rosario fouled again and went out for Jackson, and then Flory Bidunga fouled the last time (his fourth, which might have been problematic had the game gone to overtime).

“When Kohl fouled the first time, he fouled in one second,” Self said. “I wish he could have just let him hold it and foul with five seconds into it. So now you’ve got a situation where maybe there’s not 3.9. Maybe there’s 2.0 or 1.5. But our whole deal was, with only two team fouls, why wouldn’t you go ahead and foul in that situation? We left them too much time.”

And yet it wouldn’t have mattered had they successfully impeded Darling. To that end, they took out Rosario to get what Self called “our best defensive team” — starters Council, Peterson, the Big 12 Defensive Player of the Year Bidunga and Tre White, plus Jackson.

“We all knew the type of defender Elmarko has always been,” Dawson said. “He’s just always been a great athlete, and he’s always been that type of defender the way we can put him in in them late-game situations.”

But then came the straight-line drive by Darling to his right, as he ignored a potential left-side ball screen from teammate Zuby Ejiofor, as well as the opportunity to pass back to an open Ejiofor later in the play as Bidunga provided ill-fated help defense.

“St. John’s is a good team,” Council said. “It was a great layup. If it was a ball screen, we would have switched it, but he rejected it.”

And in doing so, consigned the Jayhawks to a demoralizing defeat the likes of which no KU team has endured in the postseason in recent memory.

Rosario, who scored two significant buckets in his crucial 10 minutes, had to watch from the sideline: “It was heartbreaking. I don’t even know how to put it into words.”

“Devastating, obviously,” Jamari McDowell said. “Yeah, that hurts. You don’t want to go out like that.”

But as for Jackson, his longtime teammate and fellow redshirt sophomore, the one shouldering the blame?

“He’ll be all right,” McDowell said. “It’s OK. It’s OK, because we got time. We got time.”

Kansas guard Jayden Dawson, right, comes in to comfort teammate Elmarko Jackson following the Jayhawks’ loss to St. John’s on Sunday, March 22, 2026 at Viejas Arena in San Diego. Photo by Nick Krug