Is Jeremy Case Now the Favorite to Succeed Bill Self at Kansas?

Kansas basketball head coach Bill Self announced Tuesday that assistant Jeremy Case has been promoted to associate head coach.

Case has spent the last nine years on the KU coaching staff after first joining as video coordinator in August 2016. He was then promoted to assistant coach in April 2021, a position he’s held now for the past four years.

Case was a member of KU’s 2008 national championship team and then served as graduate assistant in 2009 while completing courses for his graduate degree. After that, Case joined the Southeast Missouri State staff as an assistant coach where he served for three years before spending four seasons as assistant coach at Houston Baptist University in Texas prior to returning to Lawrence.

"Jeremy has done a tremendous job as an assistant coach since 2021," Self said. "He has played a big role both on the court and in the new world of college basketball recruiting. Jeremy and I discussed this promotion last spring but delayed announcing it with the staff changes we had going into the summer. I'm very excited for Jeremy and his family. He's a rising star in the profession."

Self has talked about how much he admires Case as a coach for a long time, saying back in 2021 that he believed Case would be a Division I head coach someday and suggested earlier this summer that he could be one of the candidates to replace him one day at KU.

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The fact that Case (the youngest coach on KU’s staff at 40 years old) received the position over long-time Self assistants Kurtis Townsend and Joe Dooley, as well as Jacque Vaughn and Tony Bland – both of whom have head coaching experience at various levels – should speak volumes about how highly Self thinks of Case.

And this may be an indication of who Self prefers to take over at KU once he decides to retire, which at this point (given his recent health scares) could be at any moment.

KU will have their pick of external options with no shortage of head coaches interested in the job, but they clearly have internal options as well.

Many thought Vaughn was the likely choice when he joined KU’s staff this summer, and that would make a lot of sense given his experience as head coach in the NBA and his ability to connect with players, like he has with Darryn Peterson.

However, Case does have more experience coaching at the college level and has proven to be a really strong recruiter these past few years for KU.

Perhaps the promotion is just a way of retaining Case and helping prevent him from leaving for another job. But if it’s more than that and Self does choose to (publicly or privately) endorse Case when he retires, that will likely carry a lot of weight with KU Athletics Director Travis Goff and the decision makers responsible for choosing the next great steward of Kansas basketball.

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