2026 Kansas Jayhawks

The 2026 Kansas Jayhawks were 24-11 and earned a 4-seed in the NCAA Tournament. They advanced to the Round of 32 before losing. The team’s College Basketball Reference page is here.

Traditional Stats

Value Offense

Value Defense

Combined Value PPGAB

Value 4-Way

The 2026 Season

Battling injury for most of the non-conference season, star freshman Darryn Peterson’s availability was the biggest story for much of the year. While he would only miss two games after the new year (one for an ankle injury and one for illness), Peterson wouldn’t be fully available to play 30+ minutes per game until the final five weeks. Throughout the season speculation raged, with people theorizing he was sitting out to protect his NBA draft stock or that he never intended to play another game in college. More than a few prognosticators looked rather silly on this front. Once he did start playing a full allotment of minutes, the narrative was quickly dropped.

With Peterson in the lineup fulltime, Kansas did not improve like it was assumed they would with a lottery pick getting serious minutes. Instead, the rest of the team got noticeably worse. KU was a +10.35 team over its first 24 games (through Arizona at home) but closed its final 11 as a +2.28 team (with a 5-6 record over that stretch). It was the third season in a row where KU limped to the finish, with 2024 being a season devastated by injury to key players (with Dickinson not 100% and McCullar missing the NCAA Tournament) and 2025 being a season with an underachieving team that showed little fight in the last few minutes of close games who lost in the tournament in a close game. The 2026 team really didn’t have a story line that it could blame its end of season poor play on…it was finally healthy and had developed a set rotation by March. If anything, it should have been playing its best basketball. Yet it was struggling down the stretch and couldn’t find momentum in March.

As was stated, the team got worse on the court after it got better on paper with the return of Peterson. But Peterson wasn’t the problem. He was KU’s most valuable player, leading scorer, and put up a Per100 value score in the 98.2%ile (sixth among all KU player seasons since 1993). With the rest of the roster in a rut, Self tried to change things up a bit late and almost stole a win in the Round of 32, but the buzzer beater from St. John’s sent KU home before the second weekend for the fourth season in a row.

The four legitimate KU-level players in 2026 get featured with an image.