Kansas basketball is favored by referees at home, according to rest of the Big 12

Kansas dramatically improved its chances of winning a record 14th straight Big 12 regular season championship with a 77-69 win over No. 20 West Virginia Saturday night in Lawrence. The Jayhawks had trailed the game by 12 points with under 10 minutes to play, but staged a furious rally to stun the Mountaineers and move into a first-place tie with Texas Tech atop the league standings.

That was the big takeaway from the evening for some people. For others, it was a statistic.

Kansas shot 35 free throws inside Allen Fieldhouse Saturday night. West Virginia shot two. Although the Mountaineers are known for their aggressive, physical “Press Virginia” style defense, that discrepancy is still staggering.

Bob Huggins, who was thrown out of the game in the closing seconds, had a few other words to describe it.

“I’ve been doing this 40 years. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a game where we shot two free throws,” Huggins said during his postgame press conference. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in a game where the disparity is 35-2. I’ve never been in a game like that. That can’t happen. You have no chance to win.

”That sad part is [the Jayhawks] don’t need it. That’s a good team. They’re very well-coached. They don’t need that. They don’t need somebody to do that. I’m going to tell you what: There’s something wrong to do that to kids who are playing their hearts out.”

Huggins is far from the first person to suggest that Kansas’ streak of conference titles might be due at least partly to something other than simply having talent that’s superior to the rest of the Big 12. In fact, calling out the Jayhawks for getting a friendly whistle in Lawrence has been one of college basketball’s hottest trends in 2018.

Earlier this month, following an 80-64 loss home loss to Kansas, Baylor senior forward Nuni Omot minced no words when talking about the difficulty of playing against the Jayhawks.

“We needed to have a lead by 10 with the last three minutes,” Omot said, “Otherwise if it was a close lead, you know, they would have started getting some calls just because that’s Kansas and they get all the calls.”

Omot, who transferred into Baylor from Indian Hills Community College before the start of last season, has played at Kansas just twice. His frustrations may have stemmed from a 2017 game in which the Jayhawks shot 27 free throws to just six for Baylor. The Bears matched Kansas in rebounds and turnovers and shot a better percentage than their hosts from the field, but lost the game, 73-68. Baylor also lost at Kansas 70-67 this season in a game where KU took 13 more free-throws than their guests.

A month before Omot made his comments, Kansas State head coach Bruce Weber also aired some grievances.

“I’m really disappointed in some of the calls, but we all were here last year, and saw the same thing,” Weber said following his team’s 73-72 loss in Lawrence.

In the 2017 meeting referenced by Weber, Kansas’ Svi Mykhailiuk appeared to get away with a blatant travel before scoring the game-winning basket for the Jayhawks.

When asked after the 2018 game to specify some of the calls he was angry about, Weber told reporters to “ask Fran Fraschilla about it.” Fraschilla, the former coach turned ESPN analyst, had stated during the broadcast of a previous KU contest that visiting teams need to be 10 points better than Kansas if they want to win at Allen Fieldhouse because of the way games are called.

Even coaches who aren’t working in the Big 12 anymore have joined the fray.

Tennessee coach Rick Barnes, who coached at Texas from 1998-2015, was asked following his team’s 59-55 loss at Missouri on Jan. 17 whether he’d ever been in another game where his team wasn’t in the one and one and the opponent was whistled for just two fouls in a half.

“Yeah, it happened every time I went to Kansas,” Barnes said. “Ask Norm about that.”

The Norm in question is Norm Stewart, Missouri’s head coach from 1967-1999 who was involved in countless tussles with Kansas during the height of the rivalry between to the two programs that no longer play one another.

The ironic thing about this being the year where Kansas gets repeatedly called out for benefitting from home cooking is that the Jayhawks have more home losses this season than any other this century. Four of KU’s six losses have come at home, and three of those four losses occurred inside Allen Fieldhouse. The Jayhawks had lost just three games in Lawrence over the last five seasons combined.

Kansas’ quest for consecutive Big 12 title No. 14 — and perhaps the debate over how the streak has gotten this far — continues Monday night when the Jayhawks host Oklahoma.