Norm Roberts first kept Bill Self’s status from KU players. What he did say rang loudly

Kansas assistant men’s basketball coach Norm Roberts walked into a room inside the team hotel Wednesday night and kept secret the news actually on his mind.

He had strategized it this way, hoping to offer his players a peaceful night’s sleep he knew he could not afford himself. It’s better they don’t know, he thought. At least not yet.

Not long earlier, he had been informed that head coach Bill Self checked himself into a hospital, leaving Roberts as the acting coach in the Jayhawks’ Big 12 Conference tournament opener against West Virginia. (And now officially for the entire tournament at T-Mobile Center.)

But for the next hour, give or take, Roberts tried to talk strictly about basketball, knowing it suddenly felt like basketball meant very little. A bit of irony placed him here, the center of attention, but we’ll get back to that.

First, it’s important to note that Self underwent a “standard procedure that went well,” per Steve Stites, chief medical officer for the University of Kansas Health System. “He is expected to make a full recovery.”

As we tend to say when these things happen, it’s yet one more reminder of how fleeting good health can be. It’s also a reminder of another sort, one less welcomed, after some erroneous reports Thursday morning that Self had suffered a heart attack, which even a few in the media repeated.

That reminder is this: “There’s always some false stuff going around social media,” point guard Dajuan Harris said. “We don’t care about none of that stuff.”

But I digress. Or maybe we digress.

Whichever, KU beat West Virginia 78-61 without its head coach on Thursday. Played really well, too. And that’s a credit to what Self has instilled not just this season but for the previous 20.

But the seemingly unexpected center of attention in Wednesday night’s meeting was actually not so unexpected after all.

See, the KU assistant coaches split the scouting duties of future potential opponents, and West Virginia has long been branded by Roberts. He faced West Virginia in Big East games when he coached St. John’s, and so this game was his. He wanted it.

But while he’d designed a plan to keep his players well-rested for one more night, well, “When it’s my scout, I never sleep that good,” he said.

Roberts, turns out, was the in-game replacement for the most important figure in KU’s program.

But his previous role, as the lead scout on WVU, provided the most important message all along.

In the days before the game, including that night beforehand, Roberts flipped on film of West Virginia tearing up KU on the glass. WVU had recorded 14 offensive rebounds in one meeting with the Jayhawks this season and 12 in another.

It felt like he showed all 26, Harris would say. And at some point, Jalen Wilson said he started to take the whole thing personally. So many of the clips had shown Wilson merely leaping for a loose ball rather than turning into his man and enforcing a real box-out.

“You want to have Coach’s back,” Wilson said.

There are a lot of reasons why KU pulled away from West Virginia in a game in which it was favored just three — my colleague, Vahe Gregorian, explored the mental acuity of an experienced team that learned of Self’s situation just hours before tip. By then, they were also told that Self would be OK.

But in the on-court examination, none rang truer than the lesson Roberts imposed Thursday.

As an assistant coach.

KU held West Virginia to just four offensive rebounds, its second-lowest total of the season. The Mountaineers totaled one second-chance bucket, their lowest output of the year.

“Correcting that kind of changed the whole atmosphere of the game,” Wilson said.

In the moments after the win, which sets up a date with Iowa State on Friday back at T-Mobile Center, Self phoned his assistant coaches. His acting head coach. Complimentary, by the way, and he couldn’t help but mention the defensive rebounding.

The coaches passed that message on to the players, along with an update that Self was recovering well enough for a conversation. The players will want you to believe they were able to block out his absence, but the truth is Self is a constant presence. It is rather obvious when that presence is not literal.

“A little less yelling,” freshman Gradey Dick deadpanned.

“We definitely need him,” added Wilson, Big 12 Conference player of the year.

Self will miss the remainder of the conference tournament in Kansas City. A return date has not been set with the NCAA tournament looming in a week.

For a day, the Jayhawks were good enough without him — because, in part, of the scouting completed without him.

On to Iowa State on Friday. Oh, and the man put in charge of that scout last week?

Roberts.