They sat in front of their respective booths inside the Kansas locker room, absorbing a six-point deficit after a half that looked too similar to their previous five in this NCAA Tournament, and waited on their coach to arrive. As he did — as Bill Self walked into the room — the players collectively braced for it.
The yelling.
The cussing.
The animation.
But they got something else instead. Self began with a deep breath, they recalled, and then matter-of-factly provided some tweaks for the second half.
He was, as one player put it, oddly calm.
“Wasn’t what I was expecting,” senior Ochai Agbaji said.
“It wasn’t like that (yelling) or anything,” point guard Dajuan Harris said.
“I kept waiting for him to yell,” guard Joseph Yesufu said. “But he was calm. So we were all calm.”
An unexpected deep breath at halftime.
Then a second-half exhale that felt a long time coming.
Kansas, at long last, popped off in this NCAA Tournament, rolling past Miami 76-50 after running the Hurricanes out of the United Center gym in the second half.
All set up by the moments that preceded it. The Jayhawks were dreadful in the opening 20 minutes. From the bench, Self responded to every possession as though it was the final sequence of Game Seven in the NBA Finals.
The Jayhawks played every possession like it was Game Seven of the NBA Finals. Agbaji remarked that the Jayhawks weren’t hitting many shots, but they were too nervous to even pull the trigger on many shots. The moment appeared too big for them. And then they went and grabbed the moment.
The halftime demeanor — an about-face — was a strategic move from Self, even if he didn’t want to credit himself for it or even acknowledge it. Because while he might have given the impression of calmness, he very much felt the inverse of it.
“I was very positively pissed,” he said, before a smile, “if I can say that.
“We’re better than this, but, damn.”
The biggest questions facing KU when it plays a lower-seeded team in the tournament have been the same for years: Will they play tight? Or will they just go play?
How do you coach a team to just have fun? That’s certainly something Self has told them before, to no avail.
Forget telling them. On Sunday afternoon, he showed them.
KU won ugly against Creighton. Won ugly against Providence. Played ugly for a half against Miami.
And then.
Whew.
So this is why Self has been saying KU had not yet reached its peak — because this group had that in them. The KU team that outscored Miami 47-15 after halftime can beat any team left in this tournament field and maybe beat any team left in this tournament field playing at its best.
They played free. They were fast. They fed the ball inside early. They took shots and hit shots.
They played like a group who took an unexpected cue from its coach and just settled down.
“Way looser,” Agbaji said. “Way looser.”
They were emotionally different.
But they were tactically different, too.
At some point during his halftime talk, Self made one tweak unfamiliar to this year’s group. The Jayhawks, he advised, would stop switching every single screen. Instead, Harris would open the half defending Miami guard Kameron McGusty, who scored 14 points in the first half. And he wouldn’t leave him. No switches. No help.
McGusty had four points after halftime, making just 2 of 7 shots. In kind, Miami scored 35 points before halftime and 15 afterward.
There are a million different things that changed after the Jayhawks emerged from the locker room — Harris locked down McGusty; David McCormack scored the initial five points and eight total in a seven-minute spurt; Christian Braun broke the dam on a three-pointer he passed up multiple times in the first half; Agbaji scored 12 points and hit two threes, one of which prompted Self’s patented first pump cutting through the air; Mitch Lightfoot scored six points off the bench.
It’s all the highlights you saw on the court.
But it’s those moments inside the locker room the players pointed back toward. The sense that it wasn’t time to panic when, ironically, it was KU’s best reason yet to worry since this tournament started. The six-point margin is their biggest deficit of the March Madness.
No wonder they expected an angry Bill Self at halftime.
He was.
They just didn’t know it.