GLENDALE, Ariz. _ Bill Self, whose Kansas teams have won 13 consecutive Big 12 Conference championships, is now a Hall of Famer.
Self was announced as part of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame Class of 2017 on Saturday at the Final Four.
He has spent the past 14 of his 24 seasons as a head coach at Kansas. Self enters the Hall after being chosen a finalist for the first time.
Self, 54, has built a career record of 623-192 and has won 82.7 percent of his game at Kansas, where he's 416-87.
Self's 2008 KU team won the NCAA championship and 2012 Jayhawks played in the title game. Eight of his KU teams have won at least 30 games, including this season's edition, which finished 31-5 and reached the Elite Eight for the second straight year.
The consecutive regular-season conference championship run started with a shared title in 2005. Three others were shared, nine were won outright, including the last four. In those years, the Big 12 sent at least six of its 10 teams to the NCAA Tournament while playing a complete round-robin schedule.
The run equals UCLA in the 1960s and 1970s as the longest in Division I men's college basketball.
Self, a former Oklahoma State guard, joined the KU staff as a graduate assistant in 1985-86, a Final Four season for the Jayhawks. Self moved on to Oklahoma State as an assistant before landing his first head coaching job at Oral Roberts in 1993.
That team finished 6-21 and ended the season on a 15-game losing streak.
Fortunes quickly changed. In his fourth season, Self's team finished 21-7 and he parlayed that success into a job a few miles away at Tulsa. Two of his three teams there reached the NCAA Tournament, with his third team advancing to the Elite Eight. Two years won or shared the Western Athletic Conference championship.
Next stop was Illinois, where in three seasons Self's teams shared two Big Ten championships.
The habit of finishing first established, Self was the top choice to succeed Roy Williams after the 2003 season, when Williams had taken the North Carolina job.
Kansas could open its own wing at the Hall of Fame. Self becomes the fifth Kansas coach to enter the Hall, joining Williams, Larry Brown, Phog Allen and the building's namesake, James Naismith.
Coaching icons Adolph Rupp of Kentucky and Dean Smith of North Carolina were Kansas graduates.
Great KU players such as Wilt Chamberlain, Clyde Lovellette, JoJo White and Lynette Woodard are enshrined in Springfield, Mass., and so is John McLendon, a 1936 Kansas graduate who has been elected to the Hall twice, as a contributor and last year as a coach.
NBA star Tracy McGrady, UConn star Rebecca Lobo, Notre Dame women's coach Muffet McGraw and Texas high school coach Robert Hughes also were selected to the hall Saturday. The 2017 Naismith Hall of Fame enshrinement will be Sept. 7-9 in Springfield, Mass.
