Plenty of story lines in this year’s NCAA Tournament

Kansas head coach Bill Self as he speaks to media members during a news conference following the NCAA Tournament selection show on CBS, Sunday, March 13, 2016 at Allen Fieldhouse on the campus of the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kan. The Jayhawks were given the No. 1 seed in the South Regional and will play Austin Peay on Thursday in Des Moines, Iowa. (Nick Krug/The Lawrence Journal-World via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT Kansas head coach Bill Self as he speaks to media members during a news conference following the NCAA Tournament selection show on CBS, Sunday, March 13, 2016 at Allen Fieldhouse on the campus of the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kan. The Jayhawks were given the No. 1 seed in the South Regional and will play Austin Peay on Thursday in Des Moines, Iowa. (Nick Krug/The Lawrence Journal-World via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT

By Associated Press March 14, 2016 4 min read

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) – The overall No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament hasn’t made it out of the opening weekend the past two years, so you better believe the boys at Kansas feels as if they have something to prove.

Even after their 12th straight Big 12 championship.

“It’s something I’ve said since I’ve been here: You come to Kansas to make deep runs in the tournament and we haven’t done that,” Jayhawks forward Landen Lucas said. “We have the team to do that. It’ll be tough, but we’ve been tested – battle-tested – and we’re ready to make a run.”

So are 67 other teams that will begin dancing this week.

The field set Sunday may be the most wide open it has been in years, and the Jayhawks may have the best odds of making it to Houston for the Final Four. But they were favored to do so the past two years, too, and were ousted by Stanford and Wichita State before they could even think about playing for a championship.