The Kansas Jayhawks basketball team is done. KU lost to VCU on Sunday, 71-61, in a shocking upset. I'm not sure what else to say. This one will sting for awhile in Lawrence. There's no way around it.
Here's what KU head coach Bill Self had to say following the game.
Well, of course I wish that you could let it go now, but you're not going to. You're going to hang on to it for a year or at least until you start playing in October. The thing about it is with the tournament, the finality of it, if we're watching it, we're watching on what can we do to prepare differently if we're in the same position next year. It's not to get our team better for now, it's over.
I'm not sure I'd be able to watch the rest of the Final Four at this point if I were a KU basketball player. It's too much right now. Kansas fans should be taking this hard because it is a major shock. No one -- or at least not many -- thought VCU had a shot. I know I didn't. So you can imagine what the players thought.
But all losses linger. There's only one time in my coaching career where the wins have felt as good as the losses feel bad. And that's one time. And that's probably the way it will probably always be. I told our team maybe a month from now or two weeks from now, depending -- kids get over it faster than adults.
Just think about it. You're sitting with this loss from March 27th to October or November. That's the rest of the spring, all of summer and the beginning of fall with this loss just sitting there. I remember the motivation Marcus Morris took from the Northern Iowa loss last year. It's deja vu.
We'll look back, 35-3. We won the league seven years in a row, we did a lot of good things this year. But we didn't accomplish what we set out to accomplish. So it's hard for me to say it's a special year, even though the kids did great. But this one will sting for quite some time. But it won't sting from lack of trying or lack of effort. It will sting because these opportunities -- I wish they came yearly, but they don't come yearly. And you've got to make the most of opportunities when you get them and we didn't do that.
I think this is a fair remembrance of the season. Excellent regular season with some ups and downs -- more ups -- but ultimately this isn't what KU had in mind. They were a team that had the talent to win the national championship. Since they didn't get that done, it will be disappointing.