Kansas Jayhawks Basketball Predictions: Dayton Flyers

The Kansas Jayhawks beat BYU last night to advance to the Maui Invitational championship game. Surprisingly, they will face the Dayton Flyers in that game. Will Kansas avoid the upset to take home the tournament title?

Take a look at what our staff thinks, then give your own prediction below.

Fizzle406: This should be a fun game. Dayton looked really good last night and they have some real guys. However ESPN in their infinite wisdom decided to air this game in the middle of the work day so I will be following along on the game thread. I wouldn’t be surprised by any outcome but I’ll say Kansas wins a close one. Kansas 77, Dayton 75

David: While this is in the middle of my work day, I’m working from home today so I’ll be watching it. However, that means I need to get stuff done early today so I shouldn’t be wasting time writing in-depth predictions about the game.

Dayton is shooting 71% from two, but that’s unsustainable, especially against a defense as good as ours. As fetch talks about in his preview, Obi Toppin presents a bit of a matchup conundrum that might force us to play our two-big look, which as Self himself has said, doesn’t look very good. Our true bigs combined for 50 minutes last night but I wouldn’t be surprised if that number is a bit higher today, though the quick turnaround might make that difficult. In the end I think Dayton comes falling back to earth a bit, and as long as Self finds a way to keep Toppin (averaging 22 ppg) from going supernova, Kansas comes away with a win. Kansas 77, Dayton 69

Kyle_Davis21: Dayton’s offense is really impressive, and while Obi is the Flyers’ best player, it by no means stops with him. But David and Fetch make good points about the quality of defenses the Flyers have faced. It’s also worth pointing out that it’s really difficult to shoot as well as Dayton has for three days in a row (BYU found that out yesterday). Meanwhile, Kansas got a bad shooting day out of the way yesterday and has the potential to bounce back against a Dayton team that allows teams to shoot 38.4% from 3. This feels like a tight, back-and-forth game throughout, with each team landing a few punches along the way. I’ll take the longer, taller Jayhawks to squeak out a win. Kansas 72, Dayton 68

Mike.Plank: A wise man once said, I have a bad feeling about this. Hopefully that feeling is wrong, but for now, the Flyers are hot and destroying everyone they’re playing. I have a hard time seeing a blowout, but it sure looks like a competitive game. Dayton 82, Kansas 79.

Andy: What Mike forgets is that BYU was hot as well. And Kansas handled them quite well in the second half. Like most teams, Dayton doesn’t have the manpower down low to compete with Dok. It will be another slow start, but Kansas will adjust at the half and pull away for an easy win. Kansas 83, Dayton 70