Dennis Parker Jr. committed to Kansas on Thursday morning, announcing the decision on The Field of 68’s YouTube channel and giving the Jayhawks a 6-foot-6 transfer guard who just spent the summer sounding like the piece Bill Self wanted most. Parker said Self told him, “Hey man, if you’re going to come here, we need you to score the ball.”
Parker, from Richmond, Virginia, is set to spend his senior season in Lawrence after a breakout year at Radford, where he averaged 18.3 points and 5.9 rebounds per game while shooting 48.4% on 12.7 total attempts per game and 37.7% from 3-point range. He scored 53 points against Coppin State on Dec. 14, the kind of night that made his jump from role player to one of the most productive scorers in the transfer market impossible to ignore.
Kansas now has its fourth transfer addition in Parker, following Keanu Dawes, Leroy Blyden Jr. and Christian Reeves. The Jayhawks can still add as many as three more players, and Parker arrives as the 12th player on a roster that is still taking shape for 2025-26.
His path to this point has been anything but direct. Parker played two years as a reserve at N.C. State after arriving as a four-star prospect and top-100 recruit out of John Marshall High School, then started 12 of 29 games for the Wolfpack’s 2023-24 team that reached the Final Four. He averaged 4.7 points and 3.2 rebounds that season, and by then he was already showing signs of the shooting rise that followed: he had gone 21-for-75 from 3-point range at N.C. State before hitting 60 of 159 shots from deep at Radford.
That development is what Kansas is betting on now, and Parker sounded eager to fit into a younger group that still needs experienced voices. He said the pieces Self has brought together are great, and that because he has been through a Final Four run, he can help guide teammates if they need it. For Kansas, the message is clear: the staff did not just add another transfer. It added a player it expects to score right away.
