Kansas Basketball: Top 20 Players Ever to Play for Head Coach Bill Self

Bill Self has built his career at Kansas but was great at his previous stops as well. Here are the 20 best players to ever play for the Jayhawks head coach.

It can be incredibly hard for a head coach to follow right after a great career from the previous one. That was the case for Bill Self, who joined the Kansas Jayhawks right after certain Hall-of-Famer Roy Williams departed for the North Carolina Tar Heels.

Kansas has been a national power for a while, so the foundation was already in place for Self to succeed. But we’ve seen plenty of times where a new coach struggles to uphold the high expectations that a program has when they first arrive.

That certainly wasn’t the case for this coach. In the 15 years that he’s been around, Kansas has made the NCAA Tournament each season that Self has been at the helm, with most of them being a top-four seed.

But what’s most impressive about Self’s tenure at Kansas has been the regular season accomplishments. After not winning it their first year, the Jayhawks have won the Big 12 Regular Season Title every single time since 2004. That’s 14 straight times in a power conference known for great basketball, something many of the all-time greats can’t claim.

But Self has always been a success, dating back to his beginning days at Oral Roberts in 1994. He spent 10 years with them, Tulsa and Illinois combined before venturing into Kansas.

Coach Self was ranked No. 4 in my earlier piece concerning the top active college basketball head coaches. Like those before him, I’ll be ranking the best players that he’s ever coached. And while the list will be Jayhawk-heavy, there were others at his previous stops whose talents helped him become the coach he is today.