Given that he’s one of six NCAA coaches who has guided three different schools to the Elite Eight, Bill Self likely would’ve ended up at the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame no matter his career path.
But even 14 years later, there are some University of Illinois supporters who wish that journey hadn’t detoured from Champaign, Ill., to Lawrence, Kansas, where Self is 416-88 with the 2008 NCAA championship on his resume.
Self understands.
“I didn’t want to leave either,” Self said Thursday, sitting at a table following the Hall of Fame’s Class of 2017 news conference. “I did not want Coach (Roy) Williams to go to North Carolina. Now if he went to North Carolina three years later, that would’ve been fine. But the timing was not right for us to leave. We had too many good things going there. And we didn’t quite see it through.”
Indeed, as Kansas got upset by 14th-seeded Bucknell in the first round of the NCAA tournament in Self’s second season with the Jayhawks, Bruce Weber guided the five future NBAers whom Self recruited at Illinois — Deron Williams, Luther Head, Dee Brown, James Augustine and Roger Powell Jr. — to a 37-2 mark and a runner-up finish to Williams’ North Carolina squad.
“Leaving was probably the most difficult professional decision that we’ve had to make and one that I looked back on a year and even two years later, ‘Did we make the right call?'”Self said. “It’s hard. And there’s a jealously that creeps in. You want them to do well. But those are our guys out there playing for the national championship.
“But it was the best thing over time for everybody. And it was probably best for those kids there. I told them all that when I left: ‘We’ve coached you. Now you get to be coached by somebody else. They’ll do some things better than we do. You can learn from both. And it can help your career.’ And I do think that was the case with those guys. But it wasn’t easy.”
Self said he still has a picture in his Kansas office of Frank Williams’ game-winner at Minnesota that gave Illinois a share of the 2002 Big Ten championship.
“We had some unbelievable games there and some really great success,” Self said. “We were like 40-1 at home in our three years. It was a lot of fun.”
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