photo by: Henry Greenstein/Journal-World

Kansas guard Melvin Council Jr. speaks to reporters on Thursday, Oct. 15, 2026, in Lawrence.

Kansas guard Melvin Council Jr. is currently eligible for his sixth season of college basketball competition under an injunction in Monroe County, New York — but why settle for six when you might be able to have seven?

“I feel like I might have another year, too,” Council said with a smile. “You know? If it’s five years (under new NCAA rules), it’s going to be my fourth year at Kansas — why not get another year, you know?”

It sounds like a joke, but a year ago at this time — and even in February when Council and head coach Bill Self first expressed public interest in another year for the veteran guard — the idea that he would be on KU’s roster for the 2026-27 roster seemed like a bit of a pipe dream.

And yet there he was back in the Allen Fieldhouse media room on Thursday afternoon, preparing for another season at the school where he quickly became an all-time fan favorite and Big 12 newcomer of the year in 2025-26.

“I’m hoping to win, to win a lot of road games and to go farther than what we did last year in March Madness, and just bringing that 2022 season back to Lawrence, that’s what I’m hoping for,” Council said.

It’s been a long road back to college basketball for Council, who had a waiver request denied in May, competed in the NBA Summer League with the New Orleans Pelicans, initially sued the NCAA in Douglas County, then pivoted back to his home state of New York, where he eventually received the injunction. (The NCAA can still appeal but has not yet done so.)

He characterized it as a chaotic process that involved going back and forth between New Orleans and Rochester to work out, and all the while his mother Chalonda Dillon was telling him, “God’s going to do his thing, and when he do his thing, don’t look back.”

Council’s lawyers wrote in legal documents that the move from Douglas County to Monroe County was to broaden his options beyond KU. But Council on Thursday essentially said that he always knew where he wanted to go — including when, by his own admission, he trolled fans by stating that he would choose between Kentucky, LSU and “Mitchigan (sic).” The next morning he officially announced his return to KU.

Since then has come the work of reintegrating himself into the team he thought he had left. By all accounts, Council has approached it with a certain level of humility. Sophomore wing Kohl Rosario recently said that he embraced the opportunity to play scout-team defense when he first came back to practice.

“Coach never said I was going to start or nothing, so I got to have that mindset, that chip on my shoulder to just play on the scout team and get to my starting position,” Council said, “and just playing against the offense, showing the freshmen that when you play against other people, they’re not going to care who your name is.”

Self has indeed suggested that he is not going to start Council or his fellow late-stage returnee Tre White in the early going.

“I didn’t talk to (the previous team members) about to try to convince them that this is best for us,” Self said of bringing back Council and White. “Hey, if these guys can help us win, why wouldn’t we want them here? I want them here. And if you think that they’re a factor in you individually, then play better. Or try harder. But that’s not a threat — that’s just you should care enough about the place you’re at that you want to be as good as you possibly could be.”

“… Now, I think Melvin and Tre would tell you, ‘It’s not (a) clear-cut path for us either.’ Because those other guys, they’ve worked hard and performed pretty well.”

Freshman guard Taylen Kinney, one of the players who stands to compete most directly with Council for minutes, said, “Having them in my ear, competing with them every day, they make me so much better.” Fifth-year transfer center Christian Reeves said that in some sense it feels like they’ve been around all along.

“They opened arms to us,” Council said. “It wasn’t no ‘Oh my god, why are they here?’ They showed love and we showed love to them.”

Council, for his part, was highly complimentary of his fellow guards Kinney and Leroy Blyden Jr., and would be happy to split time with them, “because that’s what I needed last year, somebody to share minutes with me, and I didn’t have that.”

He hasn’t exactly had that at any point in college. Council has started 164 of his 170 games at the collegiate level and hasn’t played fewer than 20 minutes in a game since March 9, 2024, when he was at Wagner.

In any case, he hasn’t forgotten how last season ended, with the “shocking moment” of a buzzer-beater that knocked the Jayhawks out of the NCAA Tournament with a loss to St. John’s: “That’s a game that I can’t get out of my head,” Council said.

Now that he’s received a second chance, he’ll hope to make the most of it with a new roster around him.

“Last year we cared about winning, but we just had ups and downs,” Council said. “We never had our full team. And God forbid (something) happen, we got our full team this year.”

“To see him walk through those doors that first practice, man, it lit everybody up,” White added. “So I’m glad to have the dog back in the house for sure.”