In an interview on the same radio airwaves, 610 Sports, on which his father, Carl Henry, ignited a firestorm of browser refreshing, Tweets, and texts about his son’s future, Xavier Henry told everyone that he will honor his commitment to Bill Self and Kansas after all.

News of a family meeting last night broke soon after Carl Henry’s interview yesterday afternoon, and Bill Self and top assistant Danny Manning wasted no time making the trip to Oklahoma to give a last second pitch to the Henry family. When reports of Henry’s decision to switch to Kentucky started breaking last night, Self and Manning had yet to conclude their meeting with the Henry’s.

I think we may have forgotten why Bill Self has been as successful as he has been at every juncture. The man can flat recruit.

This last battle, though, was a nontraditional one. It wasn’t a mano a mano duel between Self and Calipari, because Calipari wasn’t doing any active recruiting of Henry. It was more like Self vs. the Henry’s perception of the Kansas media, or even Self vs. Xavier himself.

Regardless, though, Self kept a top 10 player nationally on board, which now basically ensures that his team will hold onto the utterly meaningless top spot in preseason rankings.

Even so, Henry’s recommitment to Kansas is the latest chapter in what will probably turn out to be one of the more bizarre player-fan base relationships in college basketball. Xavier was all set to be the favorite son of Kansas basketball, following his mom dad to play for the Jayhawks, then he chose to attend Memphis.

Calipari left Memphis, then Xavier and brother CJ chose Kansas almost by default. Then there were public flirtations with Europe for Xavier, rumors of switching to UK for both, then a family meeting to make a final decision. The Henry’s were disenchanted with the way they were portrayed in the media and it looked like they were all set to head to UK, thereby becoming some of the more reviled figures in Kansas basketball. Instead, they stuck with their decision, and will head to Lawrence.

Kansas message boards are a very interesting place to be right now to see the varying reactions to the events of the past few weeks. Needless to say, it will be very interesting to watch how this already complex relationship will develop and how much latitude the Henry’s will have if anything does not go really well in the Henry-KU pairing.

I’d be lying to you if I said that I didn’t do a couple impromptu dance moves around the house as I thought about the possibility of adding a shooter and scorer like Xavier Henry to next year’s UK team when it looked like a probably outcome. However, I know that I am going to have ZERO trouble moving on and getting excited about what we already have. I was getting a bit fatigued at all this recent drama, I can’t imagine what this had to be like for Rock Chalkers.