OMAHA, Neb. _ Bill Self's worldview is fairly simple. You can be soft, or you can be not soft. If you are soft you will be a loser. If you are not soft, you have a chance to someday be tough, and this shapes everything in his world.
He's told the story before about the time he was going through all the reasons the Kansas basketball job might not be for him. The conversation was with his father.
"If you're soft," Self has remembered his dad saying, "you shouldn't go."
Self took the job, obviously, and over the years has called everyone close to him soft at one time or another. No single word better embodies everything Self despises. In practice, if Self screams the word, that's all the players and coaches need to know they have to run the play again, only better, or else they'll be there all night.
All of this is a leadup to the time Self called this team the softest he's had in 15 years at Kansas. It was not the first time Self used his nastiest four-letter word on his team in public and, actually, it was not the millionth time Self used the word in private. Once, in 2013, he said, "physically this is our softest group of all time."
But even that slam was couched, Self prefacing the insult by saying the group was tough mentally, which means what he said three months ago is the hardest he's been on one of his teams in public.
"Softest team that Kansas has had since I've been here," Self said after a loss to Arizona State.
Now, perspective is a powerful thing. Self said that after his team's second straight loss, and since then the Jayhawks have won 22 of 27 games. They won the nation's best RPI league by two games. They beat four of the conference's other six NCAA Tournament teams on the road, won the league tournament without their starting center, and beat one of the nation's physically strongest teams with their best player making one of seven shots.
So, when Self said that _ softest team that Kansas has had _ he was either speaking literally, emotionally, or simply trying to send a message to his players.
"One hundred percent literally," Self said on Thursday. "And a lot of it probably was emotional, too. And probably trying to send a message as well."
Three for three, then, which is what assistant Norm Roberts predicted Self would say. Few know Self better. Roberts has worked for Self at each of his four coaching stops _ first at Oral Roberts in 1995, then Tulsa, then Illinois and now at Kansas.
Roberts knows that Self sometimes uses news conferences to coach his guys, but said he won't ever say something he doesn't believe. This is an important distinction, and Roberts said the public indictment _ softest team _ came after a few rounds in private.
Saying it out loud, to a bunch of TV cameras and reporters, was part of Self's process.
"He tells guys right away, one of the first things," Roberts said. "He'll say, 'This is what you have to understand about me. If I feel something _ good, bad, or indifferent _ I have to say it because if I don't I'm going to start to believe it's really true, when I know we may just need to work through it."
Udoka Azubuike, the sophomore center, said Self used the same label to them directly during practice before taking the message public.
"He was pissed off about it," Azubuike said.
"Most of us took it as a message," forward Mitch Lightfoot said.
The biggest misconception about Self's use of "soft" is that he means physical toughness. That can be part of it, but there's a reason he couched the 2013 insult with "physically" and prefaced it by complimenting mental toughness.
Self's frustration with this group has never been about the physical. It's about the mental. It's been about playing through a mistake, and about remembering what's said in the huddle when it's time to play, and, notably, about not letting Arizona State hit 14 of 28 3-pointers when the scouting report was largely about guarding the 3-point line.
"We were soft," Roberts said. "But we were more soft in our thoughts and our focus than we were physically."
Part of the problem was that Self has always relied on depth to help him coach. Deciding who plays how much is a coach's superpower, but one of Self's shortest rosters did not allow it. He briefly took Lagerald Vick out of the starting lineup as a form of punishment, but even then Vick ended up playing an average of 30.5 minutes in those games.
So without the power of the bench, Self had to go public, and Roberts said the turning point actually came in the next game after Self's slam. KU won at Nebraska when Svi Mykhailiuk hit a 3-pointer for a one-point lead with 21 seconds left, and then Azubuike blocked a potential game-winner at the rim with 5 seconds left.
Kansas is 13-2 in games decided by 10 points or fewer since that day. In one five-game stretch, KU closed a four-point win at TCU with free throws, beat Iowa State after the score was tied with 2:30 left, beat K-State with a bucket on its last offensive possession and a stop on its last defensive possession, won at West Virginia after trailing by 12 with 10 minutes left, and beat Baylor after trailing by six with 2:51 left.
That's not soft, and whether this was all part of the master plan following an emotional loss at home or not, Self has re-calibrated his view.
A little.
"We're not a soft team," he said. "We're not. But we haven't been a tough team, either."
Self has always defined toughness more mentally than physically, and the clearest embodiment of that on the court is winning games without playing well _ that when you're missing shots you find a way to make your opponents miss a little more.
The standards are high here. Self said this group of guys has climbed its way to the middle in his toughness rankings. Two more wins, and maybe they can continue to rise.
