Amid all the entertainment, pageantry and general silliness of Friday’s Late Night in the Phog, Kansas basketball coaches Bill Self and Brandon Schneider provided some serious, relevant insights about their teams for the upcoming season.
Between their broadcast appearances during their teams’ scrimmages and their postgame press conferences, they shed some important light on player personnel.
Here’s more detail on some of the most salient items they mentioned.
— Jamari McDowell’s outlook for the upcoming season remains to be determined. Self said he spoke on Friday to McDowell and his family and told them, “Let’s just roll the dice and see how it plays out” when it comes to McDowell’s role for the upcoming season.
The sophomore from Manvel, Texas, played rarely in his first year in Lawrence and could be a candidate for a redshirt in his second year now that KU has loaded up on off-ball guards. However, Self explained that McDowell has had an edge this offseason over some of those transfers — AJ Storr from Wisconsin and Rylan Griffen from Alabama — but that the transfers could catch up as they take more time to settle in.
He said that if McDowell were only to be in a position to play sparingly again, “I think he’s going to be too good of a player to waste a year like that.”
— Hunter Dickinson has a minor foot issue. The fifth-year center and Big 12 Preseason Player of the Year Dickinson left the court late in the Late Night scrimmage on Friday with what Self characterized as a sprained foot that had been bothering him for a week.
Self said Dickinson “aggravated” the foot but that he should be OK in a couple days.
— Self had high praise for David Coit on the ESPN+ broadcast of Late Night. The coach embraced the (frequently offered this offseason) comparison of Coit to an even smaller Remy Martin — another transfer who ended up playing a key postseason role in the 2022 national title.
Coit hit a pair of 3s during the scrimmage and Self said he has been the team’s best perimeter scorer in practices recently. The late-summer addition from Northern Illinois, who began his career at Atlantic Cape Community College, “has got a chance to start, but I also see him being a guy that he’s going to score 20 points in multiple games this year.”
— On the women’s basketball side, freshman Regan Williams could make an immediate impact in the post.
The 6-foot-3 native of Kansas City, Missouri, who was the first center to play in the team’s Late Night scrimmage, “has really done a great job as a young player,” Schneider said on the ESPN+ broadcast, which is especially important given the void left by center Taiyanna Jackson’s graduation. KU tried to get a post player in the offseason but it was “very difficult and, we found out in the portal, very expensive.”
Now, Schneider has repeatedly said that the Jayhawks will play a different style centered on guard S’Mya Nichols that spreads the floor with outside shooting.
“There’s ways that when you’re smaller and quicker, you have to use that to your advantage,” Schneider said on the broadcast. “And against the bigger bodies that you’re talking about, we’re not going to go down in there and wrestle. We’ll try to get (Williams) away from the basket and let her use her quickness and her ability to stretch the floor.”
Mike Gunnoe/Special to the Journal-World
