5 overreactions from the first Kansas basketball scrimmage of the offseason

3. Bill Self will disperse minutes more evenly than he did last season

You could say what you want about last year’s Kansas basketball bench. Perhaps Ernest Udeh Jr. and Zuby Ejiofor didn’t get enough floor time to develop at the beginning of the season, and maybe MJ Rice would have performed well if he was not injured. But the bottom line is that KU’s bench was flat-out bad. We all witnessed it when KJ Adams got into foul trouble in the season-ending loss to Arkansas, which you could argue lost KU the game.

Kansas ranked 345 out of 352 qualifying D-I schools for bench points per game in 2022-23, sitting at a measly 10.89 average. For a college basketball powerhouse, that is unacceptable. Thankfully, Bill Self rejuvenated his second unit in the offseason and won’t have to be as reliant on his starting five. There still might even be an extra piece waiting to be added this offseason.

The reason this prediction is being made is that there is so much talent on the roster, and unlike last year, there are several proven names who we know can ball out. For the unknowns like Morris and Jackson, they can’t be any worse than what fans had to witness with Joe Yesufu and Bobby Pettiford last year. In fact, the sky is the limit for those two. We might be jumping the gun by saying that Kansas’ bench will be much improved, but no one can deny it has tons of potential. As a Jayhawk fan, it would be terrible to have to see each starter go out and play 35 minutes of each conference game again.