Practically speaking, anyway, Kansas men’s basketball coach Bill Self knows it’s time to stop basking in the 2022 national title.
That was then, after all, and this is now.
“We need to turn the page,” he said Wednesday at T-Mobile Center during Big 12 media day. “We should be tired (of) talking about it.”
But even as Self gazes toward a league that’s “a monster” and faces the intriguing new team he’s fusing together, this is a fine time to put last season in further context, too.
Both in itself and in what it suggests about the future for KU and Self — who now is one of 15 coaches to win more than one Division I men’s national championship.
He sits one away from the more rarefied tier (just six) of those with more than two.
Self gave an illuminating answer when I asked him whether winning a second one 14 years after the first held a different meaning.
“It does feel different to me,” said Self, sitting at a table with several media members gathered around. “We talk about this all the time. It’s much easier to have a great team than it is to have a great program. Because it’s just a snippet of time and things could just fall right for one year. And you want to do it where there’s a foundation of consistency that you can be in the game. And I think that we’ve done that.
“But still, though, in order to validate the first one you’ve got to get a second one.”
Pausing to grin, he added, “And maybe to validate the second one you’ve got to get a third one, I don’t know.”
Validate for himself as much as anyone else.
Because even if no one at KU ever made him feel pressure to get his second title, his internal pressure gauge was ever-churning. Especially after his Jayhawks had become a virtually perennial No. 1 seed.
At some point, he told himself, “We need to deliver on this.”
“I don’t think I felt the pressure, but I certainly felt the relief of not feeling the pressure,” he said, smiling. “Because I’d never admit to feeling pressure. But it certainly felt like a burden was lifted after we won another one.”
He later added, “We needed to do more than what we’ve done. And I’ll be the first to admit that.”
So the second one felt different merely for being the second one.
But it also felt different in a way that speaks to how circumstances, and Self, have changed in quite the span between titles.
Mario’s Miracle notwithstanding, the 2007-08 team was something you could see coming all along.
The 2021-22 team took some time to coalesce, in part because the dynamics were different in recruiting since the NCAA in September 2019 sent KU its initial notice of five Level One violations that remains unresolved.
“Some of those ‘non-gets’ back then have turned into unbelievable ‘gets’ moving forward,” Self said.
He was referring to the likes of Ochai Agbaji, Dajuan Harris and Christian Braun, who developed into varying levels of stardom despite not having been stamped as top 20 recruits out of high school.
Out of that blossomed a group that Self calls “the epitome of a team,” with a distinct chemistry fuel-injected by rare selflessness.
A team of individuals who bought into the notion, he said, that “if it was good for the masses, it was good for me.”
So that was “pure joy” for Self, who called the season “like the most fun I ever had on a court.” At times, he found himself thinking, “I can’t believe I get to do this.”
As for what’s to come?
“Last year, going into it, you had a kind of security blanket with guys who have played in your program,” Self said. “Now I’m nervous, because you don’t have those same security blankets.”
Self and KU face a fresh challenge, to be sure. The NCAA issue still hovers, Kansas has lost five key performers from last season and, unlike after 2008, such factors as name, image and likeness and the transfer portal have changed so much about college sports.
“We’ve been a blueblood a long time,” said Self, rattling off a few others in that category and adding, “You could always recruit to being that.”
Now, he said, you can still recruit to that.
“But NIL has changed the game so much that that doesn’t carry the same value as what the NIL opportunities do,” he said. “So it’s different … There’s a lot of potential bluebloods out there based on how NIL goes.”
Then there’s the matter of NIL ramifications even within a program.
“If somebody wants to give ‘Gary’ a certain amount and somebody quadruples that to ‘Matt,’ is Gary going to be happy for Matt?” he said. “And the answer is … maybe not. And that’s how division in the locker room can occur, too.”
To hear Self’s former players tell it, circumstances around the program aren’t the only things that have changed since 2008. Self, they tell him, has softened.
Do they have a case?
“Yeah, they’ve got a case,” he acknowledged.
Such as: Mario Chalmers was at a recent preseason practice that was ending after only about two hours and playfully confronted Self:
“‘What are you doing, Coach?’”
But Self, who will turn 60 in December, has come to see over time that maybe he wasted energy on some of the wrong things when he was younger. And that there’s a way to get things accomplished, he said, “without having everybody … (thinking) it’s the hardest thing they’ve ever gone through.”
Asked for an example of what used to set him off and might not now, Self said it used to infuriate him when a player didn’t do exactly what he was told.
Then it would snowball into him thinking it was personal, that he was being defied on purpose just to antagonize him.
Now, he said, “You kind of learn to roll with some things different than what you did before.”
Just the same, we figure KU players won’t so much get the benefit of the doubt as the benefit of Self’s fire as he tries to forge another contender out of a group highlighted by returnees Wilson and Harris, Texas Tech transfer Kevin McCullar and a promising freshman class led by Wichita native Gradey Dick.
“I like the guys,” Self said, “but liking them doesn’t translate to wins.”
At least not automatically.
But even if Self “would never admit to feeling pressure,” you can bet he’s out to validate the second national title now.
And that he knows now he can create a title team without hoarding the best players in the country as long as he has the right mix of talent and buy-in.
By nimbly navigating the new world order in college basketball and having learned more than one way to build a champion as he makes changes himself, even as we’re left to wonder how the NCAA rulings will play out, we figure the next championship is more a matter of when and not if.