If Bill Self had it to do over again, he wouldn’t have been quite as candid about the personal crossroads he was staring at starting March 22, after his Kansas Jayhawks lost 67-65 to St. John’s in the second round of the NCAA Tournament.

But rather than evade or dismiss post-game questions about his coaching future in the context of his health gone volatile the last few years, Self treated them as entirely valid.

In the process of explaining that he still loved coaching but wanted to feel well enough to do it properly, murmurs that he may consider retiring erupted into a national storyline.

As he sat in his office for an interview with The Star on Tuesday, Self figured he could have finessed the matter better and lamented that he’d said too much.

“Which obviously got more traction probably than what I had hoped it would have,” he said, smiling and adding, “When you start it and you say a little bit, you can’t put the paste back in the tube.”

Then again, he was facing a true quandary after a series of heart-related issues — among other ailments over the last few years — that he increasingly felt made for no way to live.

So the fact he was facing a dilemma, he said, “was 100% accurate.”

And it wasn’t an option, he said, to reflexively keep going and then figure out later whether he should coach into the season.

Delaying it, he said, “crushes next year’s opportunities.”

Changing his mind later, he said, would feel like “I’ve been dishonest to everybody.”

So he had to decide ASAP to be either all-in or all-out.

And retirement initially was the expectation for the 63-year-old Self, who led KU to national titles in 2008 and 2022 and was inducted in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2017.

From late in the regular season through that season-ending game against St. John’s and into the first few days of Self’s retreat to determine his future, that’s how he was mentally girding himself.

“I thought I was most likely out after our last road trip to Arizona,” he said, “just because I felt so bad.”

Beyond acknowledging his depleted energy during the Big 12 Tournament, Self declined to elaborate on specifics of that bad feeling.

Suffice to say, though, that and much more was on the mind of Self and his family when he went to Dallas in late March to get what he called an “extra opinion” — on how to mitigate his issues and what risks coaching itself was posing.

Gridlocked as he might have been overall, Self wasn’t working through lists of pros and cons.

Quite the opposite, actually.

Entering that appointment with a specialist his doctors had recommended, Self said he felt “helpless” because he wasn’t controlling the narrative or the decision. And going into it Self figured the doctor would say, “Bill, it’s time” … and that would be that.

But the doctor didn’t say that at all.

And he did speak to what Self considered the most vital point of all: that the stress of the job was not putting him further in jeopardy.

“I needed to hear that,” Self said. “I needed to hear that my profession wasn’t the reason why I felt bad.”

Indeed, he heard that neither coaching nor lying on a beach was going to minimize or enhance what he called “the situation that I had with my heart.”

Between that assurance, some tweaking of medications and yet more attention to diet and exercise, Self left the appointment embracing what he said he’d been told by the doctor he declined to name:

“‘There’s no reason why you can’t feel well and do this as well as, as efficiently as, you ever have …’” he said. “So I probably went from thinking I was done to feeling really good and excited within (that) three-hour meeting.”

As for navigating that with his wife, Cindy, and children Tyler and Lauren, Self said he “knew what their preferred stance” was entering that doctor’s appointment.

“But that was only because they knew I didn’t feel well,” he said, adding that they wanted him to do what makes him happy as long as he was feeling right and not adding risk.

Starting with that boost of affirmation and adrenaline and changes to his medicines, Self said he started feeling fresh energy pumping into him immediately.

Turned out there also was a considerable therapeutic benefit to the self-imposed brisk timeframe: Weeks later, Kansas signed Tyran Stokes, the nation’s top high school recruit.

Landing him exhilarated Self, who in the process of rounding out KU’s incoming class through the transfer portal said, “I don’t know that we as a staff ever worked harder” than during that three-or four-week period.

Self’s energy now is such that he played 36 holes of golf the other day, and he’s continued to lose weight — down some 50 pounds in the last year.

He feels “great from a psychological standpoint” as he’s come to realize how treatable his heart issues are with improvements to the mesh of medicines.

Diet and exercise still will be vital for him. And while he says “not great at” that sort of stuff, he also says “I’m a different guy from that standpoint than I was a couple years ago.”

But still the same guy who loves to coach … when he feels right.

Meaning he’s gone from being on the verge of retiring to figuring this isn’t necessarily his last season.

“It’s not time for me; I don’t think it is,” he said. “So I’m definitely thinking that this is not a one-year deal at all. If the doctors tell me I’m good, there’s nothing I’d rather do.”

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Why KU coach Bill Self felt ‘helpless’ before doctor’s meeting that led to return

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