Kansas' Frontcourt Concerns in the Rearview Mirror in Pursuit of a No. 1 Seed

The No. 8 Kansas Jayhawks shot the lights out in Phog Allen Fieldhouse on Monday night, draining 16 three-pointers in a 104-74 blowout of the Oklahoma Sooners.

No big surprise, though, right?

Kansas is one of the nation's better three-point shooting teams, and Oklahoma's defense has been a total disaster for most of the season. The Sooners also entered the night having lost eight of their last 10 games, while the Jayhawks are doing that annual thing where they make everyone look foolish for even entertaining the possibility that they won't win the Big 12 regular-season title.

From that perspective, this game went according to expectations.

But in between all the three-pointers that Devonte' Graham (five), Svi Mykhailiuk (four), Malik Newman (four) and Lagerald Vick (three) canned, something unexpected and quite noteworthy happened.

Mitch Lightfoot and Silvio De Sousa stole the show.

In the span of 66 seconds early in the first half, Lightfoot blocked three Oklahoma shots and threw down an alley-oop dunk as Kansas opened up a 20-4 lead.

Several national analysts weighed in on Twitter after the block spree:

When both Lightfoot and Udoka Azubuike got into modest foul trouble, it was De Sousa's turn to shine. He had 10 points and six rebounds in just 13 minutes of action. But there were two separate bursts—one with five minutes left in the first half; the other with 12 minutes left in the second half—in which his name was basically the only one to show up in the play-by-play log for several possessions, because he was doing everything.

For both reserves, this was far from the norm. And if it's the start of a new trend, Kansas just might be the new favorite to win the national championship.

Long before the 2017-18 men's college basketball season began, we all knew the biggest red flag for Kansas: frontcourt depth. And that was back when we assumed Billy Preston would make significant contributions as a 5-star power forward. Had we all known that he would never appear in a game for the Jayhawks, they likely would not have been a preseason AP Top 10 team.

Azubuike has been better than anyone could have guessed, leading the nation in effective field-goal percentage, per KenPom, while averaging better than 11 rebounds and 2.5 blocks per 40 minutes. But through the first 27 games of the season, he was a bit of a one-man show for the Jayhawks.

Ed Zurga/Getty Images

Lightfoot would occasionally come in and block some shots, including a huge nine-point, six-block performance in an early-January road win over TCU. But he hasn't scored in double digits in a game since before Thanksgiving, and he entered Monday having blocked more than two shots in just two of the previous 23 games. On most nights, his job simply has been to stand in the paint on defense and eat minutes while Azubuike rests.

And De Sousa had been a complete non-factor. He didn't reclassify and join the team until mid-January. In his first nine appearances, he had a combined stat line of 22 minutes, five points, seven rebounds, one block, six turnovers and eight personal fouls.

To be fair, those numbers were not a proper representation of what De Sousa can do. He was a highly touted recruit who was given the near-impossible task of joining a team in the middle of conference play—the best conference in the nation, no less—and who was only given a couple of minutes in each game to try to find his rhythm.

Whether tonight was a turning point for the youngster or whether it was just an anomaly against an atrocious defense remains to be seen, but at least now we know the Jayhawks aren't necessarily screwed in the NCAA tournament if Azubuike gets into early foul trouble.

Speaking of the Big Dance, Kansas was already going to be a No. 1 seed in this week's projected bracket, but this blowout win over Oklahoma further solidifies it.

In fact, even if the Jayhawks lose at Texas Tech on Saturday and end up not earning a share of the Big 12 regular-season title for the first time since 2004, there's still a great chance they land on the top line on Selection Sunday.

Kansas currently has nine quadrant 1 wins. If you have not yet become intimately acquainted with that terminology, that means the Jayhawks have nine wins that fall into one of these three buckets: home game against the RPI top 30, neutral-court game against the RPI top 50 or road game against the RPI top 75. The only other team in the country with nine or more such wins is North Carolina (9-5).

The Jayhawks also have eight quadrant 2 wins and have an overall record of 17-5 in those top two groups. The only other teams with more than 13 such wins are fellow projected No. 1 seeds Villanova (15-3) and Xavier (15-4). And every game from this point forward is going to at least be a Q2 opportunity for Kansas, so it should only pad its lead in that category.

Heck, after all that time so many in the national media spent prematurely lamenting the end of the Big 12 streak, Kansas could still play its way into an outright title and the overall No. 1 seed by winning out.

If and when the Jayhawks get there, it's going to be fun watching everyone completely bail on their previous assertions that this team can't even reach the Final Four.

We'll cut the experts some slack, though. There was no good way to know that Lightfoot and De Sousa had this in them, and there's no good reason to doubt this team now that those backup big men have arrived.

Kerry Miller covers men's college basketball for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter @kerrancejames.