Initially ‘scared’ after seeing ‘knot on my head,’ KU’s Rylan Griffen ready for WVU game

Kansas junior Rylan Griffen looked more like an 190-pound cruiserweight fighter than a college basketball player on his Dec. 23 flight back home to Dallas for a short three-day Christmas vacation.

“I had a black eye for two days. I actually couldn’t see out of it really until Christmas when it started to open up a little bit,” Griffen, who bumped heads with Brown guard Jeremiah Jenkins with 17:30 left in the second half of the Jayhawks’ Dec. 22 home victory, said on Monday.

Showing no signs of the puffiness above — or discoloration around his right eye — the 6-foot-6 combo guard spoke to media members Monday at a pre-KU-West Virginia news conference at Allen Fieldhouse.

Tipoff is 1 p.m. Tuesday at Allen with a livestream on ESPN+.

“It’s all good now,” added Griffen, who headed to the locker room for treatment and never returned for the remainder of the Brown game. “I think even all the black stuff is gone now, too.

“It was kind of crazy. I actually thought I slit it, because I slit my eye three times last year. It was the same type of feeling. Seeing a big knot on on my head, on my eye, kind of had me scared. It’s fine now. You can’t tell anymore.”

Griffen, a junior transfer from the University of Alabama, says he’s 100% physically and mentally heading into Tuesday’s Big 12 opener for both teams.

He averaged 6.9 points and 2.5 rebounds with 13 total assists to eight turnovers while playing in 10 of KU’s 11 games during the nonconference season.

“Definitely,” Griffen said, asked by a media member if he’s “settled into” his role at KU.

“Just knowing how we want to play, what we’re trying to get into. Knowing that we pretty much get every team’s best game for the most part ... just having all that in my mind now, experiencing that after the first part of the season. Just knowing that we’ve got to win and then everybody pretty much is going to be happy if we do that,” Griffen added.

Of KU’s transfer guards, he has started seven games. Zeke Mayo has started nine contests, AJ Storr and David “Diggy” Coit three and Shakeel Moore none.

“When (media members) talk about transfers with us, you guys are primarily referring to AJ and Rylan and you’re not referring to Zeke, who’s fit in quite nicely, and you’re not referring to Diggy (Coit), who has done probably everything we thought he could do when he came,” Self said Monday. “And then Shak really hadn’t had a chance yet.

“I think ‘Shak’ out there every day (since return from foot injury two games ago) and with AJ and Rylan, they’re both going to be much better players the last 2/3s of the season than they have been the first third, just because I do think they’re more comfortable.”

Self says he has not been disappointed at all in the performance of his transfer guards. KU enters the game 9-2 and ranked No. 7 in the country. Unranked West Virginia, which is led by former Oklahoma State guard Javon Small’s Big 12-leading 19.7 ppg, also has won nine of 11 entering the league opener.

“Whenever you recruit somebody and everybody says how great they are, including me, and then you get them every day and you see warts that you didn’t see a lot of times in recruiting people, I can tell you this,” Self said. “... The guys that we recruited, I actually believe they are what we believe that they were when we recruited them.

“I don’t see warts. I see laboring becoming adjusted. I think that’s a positive thing in that it’s not like this guy can’t get 15 a game; it’s this guy doesn’t feel comfortable enough yet to get 15 a game.

“With freshmen, sometimes they don’t know what they don’t know and a lot of times they’re coming into a place with a blank canvas. With transfers sometimes, especially being at multiple places, they’re coming in knowing how to do something. Even though it’s not the way that you want to do it, it doesn’t mean it was wrong at the prior place, It’s just a different philosophical approach or different technical approach.”

For that, Self continued, there’s an added transition.

“When you have to stop and think about how to do it,” Self said, “as opposed to how you’ve been doing it for the last two or three years, I do think it takes away the reaction and some players get that quicker than other players. If you look at junior college guys, historically, I would bet the majority of them probably have a better last year-and-a-half than they do the first half. And it’s just to me because of comfort level more than anything else.”

Self has stressed to the entire team the importance of bringing added energy to conference games.

“But you’re also talking to a guy that played in the Final Four last year,” he said of Griffen, who knows about competitive conference basketball. “The SEC is pretty good too. And you’re also talking to a guy that played in the Big Ten last year (in Wisconsin transfer Storr). The Big Ten’s pretty good too.

“We talk about that stuff all the time, and we talk about how the intensity level will be ratcheted up higher once we get into league. We talk about the second season. We talk about a lot of things, and I think over time you would probably believe that we probably emphasize the league at a pretty significant level. ... Now that doesn’t mean that everybody buys in and each team is different, but there’ll be a different feel for the energy.”

Following the WVU game, KU will meet UCF at 3 p.m. Sunday in Orlando.