MANHATTAN, Kan. | They believe in Ron Prince.</p><p>As a long-time acquaintance of Virginia coach Al Groh, ESPN commentator Ron Franklin recalls sneaking away to an abandoned room on the picturesque Charlottesville campus or lingering in a dark hallway to steal a few minutes with the future Kansas State coach who, as an assistant on Groh&#8217;s staff, wasn&#8217;t permitted to speak with the media.</p><p>&#8220;He could break down his kids so wonderfully,&#8221; Franklin said. &#8220;&#8230; I think Ron&#8217;s abilities are far, far more than adequate.&#8221;</p><p>What Franklin saw in Prince was similar to what Jackie Sherrill says he recognized all along, part of the reason Prince&#8217;s name was scrawled high on a list the former Mississippi State coach stashed away as a means of keeping tabs on promising young assistants.</p><p>&#8220;I followed him very closely at Virginia,&#8221; Sherrill wrote in an e-mail. &#8220;We talk off and on. He is and will do a very good job for KSU.&#8221;</p><p>Both consider Prince a friend, and both think his star, perhaps a little tarnished by last season&#8217;s November swoon, remains bright.</p><p>Mention K-State&#8217;s recruitment of junior-college players, though, and suddenly it&#8217;s a divided camp.</p><p>&#8220;The most difficult thing he&#8217;s strapped with, and I don&#8217;t know how he can change it, is that when you&#8217;re bringing as many junior-college kids as he is, it&#8217;s hard,&#8221; Franklin said.</p><p>Sherrill disagrees. He routinely raided the junior-college ranks during the latter years of a 26-season, 180-120-4 coaching career.</p><p>&#8220;How,&#8221; Sherrill writes, &#8220;did Kansas State win in the first place?&#8221;</p><p>Bill Snyder, of course, paved the way in Manhattan with such practices, but even Snyder&#8217;s largest junior-college haul &#8212; 12 in 1997 &#8212; never attracted the type of attention as Prince&#8217;s recent class, which elicited responses ranging from questioning the third-year coach&#8217;s sanity to placing Prince firmly on the hot seat.</p><p>Though 19 junior-college players signed with K-State in February, only 15 landed in Manhattan. But even after defensive lineman Jack Hayes left during the first week of fall camp, the count remains at 15 &#8212; probable starting running back Keithen Valentine was a walk-on from Mississippi Delta Community College in Moorhead, Miss.</p><p>So the number, still in double digits and more than Snyder ever brought in, isn&#8217;t as high as expected.</p><p>And there&#8217;s a secondary number that troubles some. It&#8217;s six, as in the number of high school recruits in K-State&#8217;s 2008 class. Just two, Garden Plain&#8217;s Logan Dold and Basehor-Linwood&#8217;s Ethan Douglas, are from Kansas. Another, Oak Park&#8217;s Jarell Childs, is from Missouri.</p><p>But that supports Sherrill&#8217;s stance.</p><p>&#8220;If you&#8217;re smart, you get the best junior-college kids,&#8221; he wrote. &#8220;You can&#8217;t build on high school kids alone. And who&#8217;s better to understand the junior-college system than Ron? He&#8217;s been there. He&#8217;s tasted it. He understands. &#8230;</p><p>&#8220;You&#8217;d be arrogant not to (recruit junior colleges). If you think you&#8217;re that smart, then you&#8217;re not very smart. You&#8217;re there to win games, and you have to have the best players.</p><p>&#8220;Kansas State can&#8217;t compete with Texas or Southern California for kids. So where do you go?&#8221;</p><p>The emphasis, according to Prince, is having a mature team.</p><p>The problem, according to Franklin, is expectations.</p><p>&#8220;When a freshman comes in at Texas, or Texas A&amp;M, or Oklahoma, he walks into the locker room and sees all of those All-Americans and knows what the tradition is,&#8221; he said. &#8220;All of the sudden, he&#8217;s swept up in that tradition and that gives you confidence, and then he becomes part of the system. And for four years, that gives him something to emulate, to aspire to.