Across the years, Kansas men’s basketball head coach Bill Self has fashioned an unmistakable brand of play. The Kansas Jayhawks, playing Villanova on Saturday in the Final Four, feature a high-low motion offense — inside-out basketball that moves the ball and values polished big men who can score at the rim and make decisions on the perimeter. That insistence didn’t leave much room for Kansas to adopt the ongoing 3-point revolution in basketball. Kansas stuck with its high-low system even as the very premises of the game were shifting underfoot.
“When highly successful coaches adapt and succeed, like win a championship, we say they adapted to their players,” ESPN’s John Gasaway told reporter Matt Giles for FiveThirtyEight in 2016.