Kansas Basketball Is a Bracket Nightmare Waiting to Happen

You just don’t know what you’re going to get when Kansas basketball takes the court.

The Jayhawks are 5.5-point favorites Tuesday night at Arizona State, yet you can imagine them running the 11th-place Sun Devils off the court in a 25-point rout… and just as equally, you can imagine an upset.

Kansas has lost three of its past five games, a mixture of blowout losses to ranked teams Iowa State and Arizona on the road with a stunning 84-68 loss in Allen Fieldhouse to Cincinnati. Yet it’s the same Kansas group that took care of Texas Tech, Arizona and Houston in the conference’s weekly “Big Monday” timeslot on ESPN.

“College Sports Only” on Twitter had it right:

BetMGM lists Kansas with the ninth-shortest odds right now to win the national title (+3000). That’s with all the usual caveats of not knowing what the bracket will look like, and you can sense some baked-in brand-name recognition is at play there.

I’m not saying a title can’t happen. What I am saying is to be very, very careful touching Kansas when you build your brackets.

First, obviously, is the Darryn Peterson angle. I’ve already written about his spotty availability, and everyone who worries about him making it through a full NCAA Tournament is justified.

But Peterson isn’t the source of the Jayhawks’ current woes, near as I can tell. He could be shooting it a bit more efficiently, but he’s still Kansas’ leading scorer in Big 12 play at 19.9 points per game, in spite of the minutes he hasn’t played.

Metrically, Kansas has one of the stoutest defenses in the country, keeping opponents below 30% from 3-point range while ranking third nationally in block percentage.

The one consistent issue for this team has been rebounding, and that happens to be the biggest throughline between the losses to Cincinnati and Arizona.

The Bearcats beat Kansas on the boards by 11, and the Wildcats racked up a plus-22 differential. Both teams, different as they are, grabbed 14 offensive rebounds against the Jayhawks.

“I thought we played really soft, to be real honest with you,” coach Bill Self said about the Arizona game. “Foul problems didn’t help, but still, we played soft.”

Here’s the thing about offensive rebounding: It can give any team, on any night, a chance to beat anyone because of how it creates extra shot attempts. When you don’t do it well on a consistent basis, you open yourself up to upsets -- the sort of thing that gets in the way of a nice, clean run through a single-elimination tournament.

Michigan rebounds the ball extremely well. Duke does, Illinois, Arizona, Florida. They’ll be far less impervious to an early-round upset because opponents’ possessions will be one-and-done.

Kansas fans should be concerned where the team stands on the Big 12 ladder as we enter the final week of the regular season. Yes, Iowa State lost Monday night to leave Kansas alone in fourth place for now, but the Jayhawks are dangerously close to the fifth seed in the Big 12 tournament. Missing out on a top-four spot means starting the tourney one day earlier instead of having that luxurious triple bye.

So you have one extra game, one more chance to lose to a lower-ranked opponent and maybe slip a seed line in the NCAA Tournament. A No. 5 is bad enough in the conference, but being in that dreaded 5-12 matchup in the first round of the Big Dance is just asking for an underrated team to outwork you on the glass and produce an upset.