LAWRENCE, Kansas — When last year’s NCAA Tournament bracket was announced, the first thing Kansas head coach Bill Self did, after seeing his Jayhawks earned a No. 1 seed, was look for where UConn was.
Self, a two-time national champion and a Basketball Hall of Famer, told reporters in Lawrence on Thursday that he “thought it was UConn and everybody else last year.”
Self was hospitalized hours before the first game of the Big 12 Tournament with a heart issue and missed all of the Jayhawks’ postseason games as he recovered, including their loss to Arkansas in the Round of 32. If they’d won that game, the Jayhawks would’ve met UConn in the Sweet 16 in Las Vegas.
“It never came to that, but that, to me, would’ve put us in the hardest draw in the bracket being a one-seed having to go against them because I thought they were red hot,” he said. “And they were.”
UConn, of course, routed Arkansas 88-65 and went on to win the program’s fifth national championship. Now, the last two national champions, Kansas winning it all in 2022, meet Friday at the historic Phog Allen Fieldhouse in Lawrence.
“At this point, right now, in this moment, playing the defending national champions that is on a roll right now in early December is as big a game as I can ever remember, in early December,” Self said, asserting that Friday’s matchup probably won’t be the biggest matchup either team plays this season. “But I think both teams would probably agree it’s about as big as it could be on December 1.”
Kansas, 6-1 and ranked No. 5 in the country, lost to now-No. 3 Marquette in the loaded Maui Invitational but rebounded with a win over No. 9 Tennessee and snuck away with a 71-63 win on a rough shooting night against Eastern Illinois on Monday.
UConn, which had its own shooting woes to start the week, is 7-0 and set the NCAA record for the most consecutive double-digit wins over nonconference opponents with its 24th straight coming in an 84-64 win over New Hampshire.
Head coach Dan Hurley said the Huskies had ice cream brought into the Werth Champions Center from UConn’s Dairy Bar after practice on Wednesday to celebrate.
“They’ve got all the pieces,” Self said. “They’re a complete team. They could win it again this year. Danny’s got a good enough bunch that they could do that and of course they run great stuff; (they’re) well-drilled and everything else. So I don’t see a lot of glaring-type deficiencies. I see a team…
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