Kansas Jayhawks Report: Bill Self May Be The Best Coach Over The Last Decade

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Kansas Jayhawks basketball fans love themselves some Bill Self. Why wouldn’t they? The man has won ten straight regular season Big 12 Conference championships, and one a national tilte in 2008.

How does the Kansas Jayhawks head coach stack up against the best of the best though? Pretty darn well.

Duke Blue Devils Head Coach Mike Krzyzewski recently became the first man to surpass the 1000-win mark for his career in NCAA history. He has been a steady winner at Duke for more than three decades.

Over the past decade however, Bill Self has more than held his own with Duke’s Hall of Fame coach.  Chris Chase of USA Today, postulates that Self, not Krzyzewski, has been the best coach in the country over the last ten years.

Chase used this simple blind test to make his point. Can you tell which is Mike Krzyzewski and which is Bill Self?

Chase makes the point that Coach 2 has been better.

"Which coach has had the better decade? It’s an easy call for No. 2, right? Both have a title, but Coach 2 has more tourney wins (22 to 18), more Final Fours (2 to 1), more Elite Eights (4 to 2), a better cumulative seed (19 to 22) and fewer first-round losses (2 to 3)."

Of course, at this point, we know that Bill Self is Coach 2 in this chart. Chase argues that Self has been better than Coach K in the last ten seasons, in his reveal.

"But who’s No. 2? Who has the upper hand on Kryzyzewski? Rick Pitino? Jim Boeheim? John Calipari? It’s actually Bill Self of Kansas, a coach who gets his due in the sport, but is often labeled an underachiever when he can’t take his Big 12 title winners (10 regular-season titles and counting) deep into the tournament. It’s almost as if people still think of him as the guy whose teams experienced major first-round upsets in 2005 and 2006 to Bucknell and Bradley, respectively."

Chase also makes the point that Duke even missed an NCAA Tournament in this time frame, and of course, the Kansas Jayhawks have been invited every year, and never been less than a four seed.

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Plus, Bill Self wins conference championships. He has ten regular season championships in a row, and six conference tournament titles in his time at Kansas. Coach Kryzyzewski has three regular season championships in the same time frame, and five ACC Tournament championships.

Coaches, whether legends like Mike Kryzyzewski, or others trying to attain legendary status at their schools, all suffer early exits now and then from the NCAA Tournament. Duke and Kansas are always tops seeds, so if they don’t make it through that first March Madness weekend, it is going to be considered an upset.

It is hard to make it to the Final Four in the NCAA Tournament. As great as John Wooden and his UCLA teams of the sixties and seventies were, they didn’t have to deal with the tournament as it is now.

From 1953 through 1974, which includes nine of Wooden’s championship teams, the NCAA Tournament field was only 22-25 (varied at times), according to Mike Hawkins. Even in 1975, Wooden’s last title team, the NCAA field only had 32 participants.

As great as they were, how many of those incredible teams would have been upset if they had to play two more games? No one knows for sure, but upsets happen in that setting, and UCLA may not have won nine in a row under the current rules. Taking nothing away from their accomplishments, of course, because those teams unbelievable.

The point is that coaches, even the great ones, can be upset in the NCAA Tournament. Winning six straight games in that atmosphere is is incredibly difficult, and coaches should not be discounted if it happens on occasion.

Some may point to some early exists by Kansas as an argument that Self is overrated. That just winning games, and conference championships isn’t enough. That one National Championship isn’t good enough with the level of talent put on the court by the Kansas Jayhawks year after year.

That is hogwash, to be quite frank about it.

Kansas fans go home happy many more times than they go home upset. Every team in the tournament, except one a year, is going to be disappointed at the end of the season. Bill Self is a winner, no matter who his players are.

He just may be one of the best ever. Time will tell, but since coming to Kansas, he compares favorably, even to the very best in the business.

Kansas Jayhawks Vs Baylor Info

The Kansas Jayhawks live stream versus the Baylor Bears can be seen on College Sports Live. Tip-off is a noon CST, and the game will be broadcast on CBS.

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