With Durant gone, Kansas the class of the conference

John Gasaway, Basketball Prospectus

Last year, within the span of a single season, the Big 12 witnessed the arrival and departure of arguably the most dominant freshman in college basketball history. Now everyone wants to know who will be "this year's Kevin Durant." No contradiction is seen there. Maybe one should be. We are, after all, coming off a season that saw much ink similarly spilled on "who will be this year's George Mason?" The answer, depending on one's point of view, was either "no one" or "Georgetown and/or UCLA," the Hoyas and Bruins being the scrappy underdogs who, as lowly twos, represented the lowest-seeded teams to advance to the 2007 Final Four.

Which is to say Kevin Durant was an event. Hey, the event might happen again, but don't wait up nights, particularly not the very next year, because:

•He was Kevin Durant. Other people are not.

•Durant had help. More than help, really; the stars fairly aligned in Austin last year. It's not inconceivable that another equally talented freshman could emerge, but said freshman may not land on a team with a prodigious assist machine like point guard D.J. Augustin or with a genuine scoring threat in his own right like shooting guard A.J. Abrams.

•Durant was lucky enough to pick a coach, Rick Barnes, who had the rare good sense to give the 18-year-old the keys to the car, as it were, and say: "Have fun." A significant portion of D-I coaches, conversely, would have muttered sagely about needing to work on defense (Durant was in fact an outstanding defensive rebounder), "learning to play at the right speed," etc. Barnes let Durant be Durant. Future absurdly talented freshmen may not be as fortunate.

So instead of scanning the horizon for a "this year's Durant" who may never arrive, we might be better advised to keep our eyes peeled for what we know has to emerge from somewhere in 2008: this year's Florida. Who knows, it could come from the Big 12 in the form of the Kansas Jayhawks. They have a rarefied blend of about-to-be-drafted youth (Darrell Arthur and Brandon Rush), defensive warriors (Mario Chalmers and Russell Robinson), grizzled old geezers (Darnell Jackson and Sasha Kaun) and spry depth (Sherron Collins and Cole Aldrich). For the second consecutive season, Bill Self has more weapons at his disposal than any other coach in the conference.

Speaking of other coaches in the conference, they're a fast-changing cast of characters. While the latest round of off-season changes wasn't on the same order of magnitude as the previous year's--when half the coaches in the conference were new--this year's shifts mean that over the past two calendar years no fewer than 21 different head coaches have prowled the sidelines in the Big 12. Incredibly, there are just four current Big 12 head coaches who can say they held the same job 30 months ago: Rick Barnes at Texas, Bob Knight at Texas Tech, Scott Drew at Baylor and Bill Self at Kansas. The rest of the conference's jobs have turned over. (Kansas State's has turned over twice.)

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