Sam McDowell: Here's the Kansas basketball secret sauce that has disappeared this season

Sam McDowell, The Kansas City Star on Mar 15, 2025

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Arizona guard KJ Lewis paraded down the T-Mobile Center floor, moments after one last steal and one final layup, motioning his right hand to and fro.

A goodbye wave might’ve meant something, except that, well, there wasn’t much of anybody left to receive the message. A game had long been decided, its crowd long gone. And if you weren’t here to witness it, you might not believe that only five minutes earlier, a one-point margin had put the game in real doubt.

Kansas — stop me if you’ve heard this — let a close contest turn into a runaway late, stumbling to an 88-77 loss to Arizona to bow out of the Big 12 Conference Tournament two days shy of the weekend.

Goodbye, Kansas.

For now, anyway.

The Jayhawks await their seed line Sunday for their third season — or have we moved on to fourth season yet? — probably falling somewhere in the range of a 7 seed. Either way, they’ll be packing the road blue jerseys for the opening trip of the NCAA Tournament for the first time since head coach Bill Self arrived in Lawrence. That was 2003.

It speaks to one hell of a ride. For more than two decades, Kansas has been inevitable.

Late in the year.

But more to the point now: late in games.

There are lots of reasons why you secure at least a 4 seed in 21 straight seasons. A lot reasons why you total at least 20 wins every one of those years.

But KU — and more notably Self — have thrived on a secret sauce late in close games. That is the inevitability. You can’t beat them late.

Or couldn’t.

The ingredient is missing now.

Arizona led only 70-69 with 5:43 to play Thursday here in Kansas City. KU had more turnovers than buckets over the next five minutes. Guess who won?

I’d chalk it up to fatigue — four starters did play at least 36 minutes less than 24 hours earlier — but this wasn’t a bug in an otherwise smooth operation.

It’s a feature.

“I don’t think you can blame fatigue,” Hunter Dickinson said. “In this NIL era, we are paid to play, so you’ve got to be professionals and approach it like professionals. You can’t give that excuse.”

There’s that.

Plus, uh, how would you explain a season’s worth of conclusions just like it?

The most crucial KU possession late in Thursday’s game finished with one of its players stepping out of bounds.

Here’s the thing about that sentence: I could’ve copied and pasted it from the previous day. Literally. The exact same sentence. On Wednesday, even the win against UCF was actually uglier late.

Oh, but this one had its moments. One play before guard Zeke Mayo stepped out of bounds, he couldn’t corral an entry pass from KJ Adams. Those names aren’t reversed, by the way. Adams, a forward, was throwing an over-the-top entry to Mayo, a combo guard.

And that was it.

“We haven’t executed near as well (as) past teams have in crucial situations,” Self said.

He said that after the UCF game.

Might as well have said it after maybe a dozen others.

The Jayhawks will take a 21-12 record, their most losses since the 1988-89 season, into the NCAAs, an implication that they’ve gotten the doors blown off more than a few times. That happened at BYU and Iowa State, to be sure.

But the reality? They just can’t close.

The inevitability in this Kansas team is that something, anything, will go wrong. And that’s not a commentary on luck. It’s on the execution.

Consider this stretch they’re on. I’ve mentioned the past two nights.

The final KU loss of the regular season came in Houston. Kansas trailed by just three before Dickinson inexplicably just threw the ball to Houston — so inexplicable, in fact, that it prompted a meme-worthy, hands-on-head reaction from Self in which he seemed insistent on sticking the landing.

The second-to-last KU loss came two days earlier against Texas Tech. The Jayhawks trailed by just three with 30 seconds left when, out of a timeout, point guard Dajuan Harris sent a pass to ... nobody. That game had been tied with less than two to play.

At Utah, Kansas was tied with five to go before being outscored 14-7 in the final five.

At Baylor, KU led by eight with seven to go but was outscored 24-7 afterward.

I certainly don’t need to recap the Houston debacle, right?

Every last game I’ve recapped occurred within the past two months.

The Jayhawks have frequently talked this year, and particularly recently, about reaching their ceiling. About the evidence of its possibility. They did beat Duke and Michigan State, after all.

Dickinson mentioned it again after the game Thursday.

“I’d say we’re probably one of the more volatile teams in the country,” he said.

But that simplifies a season-long issue as though it’s game to game.

It’s within the game.

That’s become the most maddening feature of a maddening season that started with a No. 1 ranking.

KU played a really good 20-25 minute stretch against Arizona. Looked like the better team throughout the stretch. Mayo made some tough shots. That team can win in March.

Then came the team that lost half of its games since Jan. 25.

It is now guaranteed but one more.