For 15 years, Bill Self was college basketball’s most inevitable figure.
The Big 12 couldn’t beat him. The NCAA and even the FBI couldn’t take him down. Maybe he left a couple national championships on the table, but he got two — and every year when March Madness began, Kansas was usually one of the teams to beat.
It’s an all-time run. Is it over?
After Kansas was eliminated Sunday by St. John’s in the NCAA tournament second round, Self said “I haven’t decided” when asked if he will coach in 2026-27, citing health issues that have plagued him going back to 2023 when he was forced to miss the Big 12 and NCAA tournament after needing a stent to treat a blocked artery.
“I’ll get back and get with family and visit and see what’s going on,” he said. “I love what I do. I need to be able to do it where I’m feeling good and healthy to do it fairly well, so I’ll get back home and it’ll all be discussed.”
Kansas coach Bill Self didn't give a definitive answer when asked whether he'd be back for next season after the Jayhawks' NCAA tournament loss to St. John's. (Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images)
Sean M. Haffey via Getty Images
Sunday marked the fourth straight year for Kansas losing in the first or second round. Over the last three seasons, Self has gone 33-23 in a conference he dominated for more than a decade.
Around the Big 12, there has been speculation among coaches and administrators all season that this might be Self’s final year given both the declining results in the NIL era and the health problems. Self had to miss a game at Colorado in January after being treated for dehydration and atrial fibrillation, a condition that causes an irregular heart rate.
Self, 63, has taken Kansas to four Final Fours — although one of them, 2018, was stripped from the record books due to playing an ineligible player, Silvio De Sousa, after a former Adidas executive admitted in court that he paid $20,000 to De Sousa’s family to attend Kansas.
Self escaped that case, which was part of the FBI’s inquiry into college basketball, with minimal punishments despite the program being charged with five Level 1 NCAA violations stemming from its ties to Adidas.
“It’s certainly a year that didn’t seem like anything about it was very smooth,” Self said. “I’m probably looking at [my career] now more in [two]-year increments so I’ve tried to focus on this season and get us to a second weekend which we failed. So I’ll go back and break it down and see where that leads.”
As Kentucky fans watched their season end in emphatic fashion Sunday with an 82-63 loss to Iowa State, they saw a team that plays the way many of them probably wish the Wildcats did with an unflinching defensive scheme and attacking offense that never gives the opponent a moment’s rest.
In fact, when you look not just at how Iowa State has played this season but across T.J. Otzelberger’s five years — this will be his third trip to the Sweet 16 — it seems absurd in retrospect that the 48-year-old from Wisconsin wasn’t atop Kentucky’s list two years ago when John Calipari went to Arkansas.
Kentucky probably won’t make the same mistake next time. But the question of when the next Wildcat coaching search will take place is now a topic that promises to dominate the next eight months and beyond in the Bluegrass.
Mark Pope arrived at his introductory press conference in April of 2024 with the entire 1996 national championship team and trophy in tow. He spent his first offseason barnstorming the country for recruits and charming the fan base with public appearances meant to emphasize that he was as much a part of Big Blue Nation as the fans who fill Rupp Arena. And at the end of Year 1, which resulted in a No. 3 seed in the NCAA tournament and Sweet 16 appearance, it appeared he was set for the long haul.
But a lot has changed in 12 months. And after Kentucky’s season ended with a helpless performance in the second round, Pope’s job status heading into 2026-27 is going to be the most high-wattage topic in college basketball.
Kentucky Wildcats head coach Mark Pope is 46-26 in two seasons at the school. (Jeff Curry-Imagn Images)
IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect / REUTERS
Despite going 22-13 with a roster that cost a reported $22 million to put together, Pope is likely not in imminent danger of losing his job. There are several reasons for that.
While the way Kentucky played this season will not be considered acceptable by the school’s stakeholders and boosters, this is nowhere near the disaster the school lived through under Billy Gillispie from 2007-09, which caused them to pull the plug after two years. There is a reasonable path to write off this season as an expensive misadventure in the transfer portal, make changes this offseason and come back with a more thoughtful and coherent roster-building process.
Another issue, at the moment, is Kentucky’s ongoing athletic director transition after Mitch Barnhart announced his retirement at the beginning of March. Without a permanent AD in place, this is not the right moment to make such an important decision — which may have played into why Barnhart, who hired Pope, held off so long on making the announcement that much of the college athletics industry had been waiting on for months.
Make no mistake, however: Pope is now on the clock. He has one year to fix this. In 12 months, when a new AD is in place, it will be abundantly clear whether this season was a one-off underachievement fueled by injuries and poor chemistry or a sign that Pope is in over his head.
If social media is at all representative of the mood in Kentucky, it’s remarkable how quickly the fan base has soured on a coach who is not merely one of their own but came into the job with a full commitment to embrace the 365-day-a-year, statewide intensity around the program as its central brand.
Most coaching searches in college sports are a direct reaction to what the former coach did wrong. In this case, after 15 years of Calipari selling Kentucky as an NBA way station, Pope’s first job was to restore the idea that what mattered most was Kentucky’s one-of-a-kind fan base and honor the eight national championship banners hanging in the Rupp rafters.
The next Kentucky athletic director, however, will almost certainly understand what Barnhart did not: Brands no longer matter in college athletics the way they used to. It would be unfair to say that Kentucky is just another program in the NIL era, but the things that used to set Kentucky apart in the chase for elite players are now tangential. That should be plainly obvious after spending $22 million on a replacement-level roster.
If Barnhart had understood two years ago what wins in college basketball now, he might have looked at his coaching search differently. The ability to evaluate in the portal, spend wisely and build chemistry is everything. Instead, Barnhart leaned into track record and relationships, targeting Baylor’s Scott Drew and checking in with Billy Donovan before quickly zeroing in on Pope, who had never won an NCAA tournament game in nine years at Utah Valley and BYU.
No AD can guarantee that a coaching hire is going to work out, but Barnhart’s process — targeting an established NCAA championship coach from the pre-NIL era, an NBA coach who hadn’t been in college since 2015 and an alum with a decent-but-unspectacular track record at smaller schools showed no real logical consistency. Kentucky didn’t know what it was getting two years ago because its coaching search was led by an AD who didn’t have a good basketball theory for why he wanted who he wanted.
And now Kentucky is in the worst of all worlds. Pope is almost certainly coming back, recruiting so far looks lean and there is going to be a mass of negativity around the program heading into next season. It won’t help that Pope enters a hot-seat season with a lot of questions about his ability to communicate his message to players and fans. Many of his press conferences — including earlier this week when he stumbled all over himself trying to refute a claim by Michigan’s Yaxel Lendeborg that Kentucky offered him $7 to $9 million in the transfer portal — come off awkward and erode the gravitas a Kentucky coach is expected to have.
All of these issues can be fixed, of course, but only by Pope winning at a level he’s never won at before. More likely, this feels like a miserable 12-month, slow-motion walk toward change.
But the way Kentucky lost Sunday should show the administrators and boosters there what’s possible with the kind of relentless competence Otzelberger has brought to Iowa State. You don’t need the faded banners or the $22 million roster to build a monster team, but you do need coherence and buy-in.
Kentucky got neither this season. If the same trends emerge next year, Pope will deservedly be out of chances to figure that out.
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