K-State Q&A: Sunflower Showdown brawl fallout, future Big 12 games on ESPN+ and more
A friend of mine asked me the other day if I had ever covered anything like Tuesday’s basketball brawl between Kansas and Kansas State.
My answer: Yes.
Many years ago, before I joined the K-State beat, I wrote about a Big Sky game between Idaho State and Portland State in which players from both teams threw punches at halftime. For some reason, both teams were using the same narrow exit to get to their respective locker rooms and neither side wanted to concede the right of way. So they threw down.
Much like in Lawrence, where I was seated only a few feet away from Silvio De Sousa and James Love, I had a great view of the carnage. There was lots of shoving, a good amount of punching and too much violence. But the game wasn’t televised and smart phones hadn’t been invented yet, so it came and went without receiving much attention.
Coaches broke up the skirmish after a minute or two, decided to use alternate exits from then on and the second half went off without a hitch. There were no suspensions the next day.
Fast forward a few years to the Cincinnati/Xavier fight that left one player bloodied and eventually led to eight suspensions, with some lasting as long as six games, and there was much more interest and media coverage because the game was televised. But that game occurred in 2011, also before everyone in the arena had phones capable of taking video.
It’s interesting that De Sousa (12 games) and Love (eight games) both received longer suspensions than anyone involved in the Cincinnati/Xavier brawl, considering no one in the Sunflower Showdown melee was injured.
I’m not saying the lengths of their suspensions were too long. De Sousa earned every bit of his punishment. But it is interesting to compare both incidents. The Big 12 probably had many more angles of the brawl than other conferences have in the past, thus more evidence to evaluate. Of course, there was also the unique involvement of a WWE-style foreign object to consider.
Perhaps that is why video of this brawl dominated the national news cycle in ways that I don’t recall the Cincinnati/Xavier fight did nine years ago. As technology improves, the next college basketball brawl will probably receive even more attention.
And with that ... it’s time for another K-State Q&A.
There are lots of good topics to cover this week, so let’s get right to them. Thanks, as always, for your participation.
The Sunflower Throwdown wasn’t a positive for anyone.
But it probably won’t be a long-term negative for the Wildcats.
Fair or not, I get the feeling most casual fans view the brawl as a KU problem. De Sousa was the player at the center of the scrum and he was also the player photographed raising a stool above his head, looking as if he intended to strike someone with it.
That image was the defining moment of the entire scuffle, even though nothing came of it. That’s what most people will remember about the incident years from now. Everything else will fade into the background.
But Antonio Gordon and Love weren’t suspended three and eight games, respectively, for doing nothing. If Gordon resists the urge to shove De Sousa, does a single punch get thrown? If Love, who is somehow too hurt to play basketball yet healthy enough to jump in the middle of a melee, keeps his distance, do the players all remain on the court instead of spilling into the stands?
Anyone who watched multiple angles of the brawl knows both teams and multiple players were at fault for what happened.
Bruce Weber has talked as if he’s terribly embarrassed about what happened and repeatedly expressed remorse for K-State’s role in the brawl.
It will be a while before fans on either side of this rivalry forget what transpired earlier this week in Lawrence.
But only one team is likely to get heckled about it from neutral fans across the conference, and that team is not K-State.
Honestly, the Big 12 could have suspended more players on both teams.
The reason I don’t think the league office went there is because there were so many people involved once the brawl spilled into the seating area behind the south goal post at Allen Fieldhouse that it’s difficult to tell beyond a shadow of a doubt what exactly transpired.
It’s easy to infer what a few individuals were doing in that crowded space, but nothing is clear or obvious like the videos show with De Sousa, McCormack, Love and Gordon.
I have watched the video of De Sousa picking up that stool 50 times, and I still can’t definitively tell if he dropped it or one of the three people lurching at him knocked it loose.
There were also coaches running (and diving, in the case of Jeremy Case) into the mix to try and break up the brawl. Players on both teams left their benches when they would have been better off staying put.
We could spend this entire mailbag pointing fingers at everyone who played a role in the brawl. It’s probably best just to move on.
Well, Nigel Shadd grabbed four rebounds in three minutes of action earlier this week against the Jayhawks. It was his first action of the season, but you have seen him on the court.
I have my doubts he will play much moving forward, but a small window has opened for him over the next three games with Gordon and Love out with suspensions.
If Mike McGuirl remains out while he recovers from a concussion, K-State will head to Alabama with only seven players from its usual rotation. If the team encounters foul trouble, Weber will have no choice but to use Pierson McAtee and Shadd.
There’s no good reason why David Sloan can’t be a solid defensive player.
He is fast and he has a high basketball IQ. He has all the tools to hold his own against other point guards in the Big 12.
But he also spent his first two seasons playing in junior college, where I doubt his coaches stressed defense all that much while he was piling up assists. So he’s still learning how to play defense at the Division I level. It will be a while before he learns to play defense at the Bruce Weber level.
Isolate Sloan with an opposing guard in a one-on-one battle and he seems to do fine. He struggles when K-State goes with a zone defense or the coaches need him to rotate over and help or box out on a play. It seems like Weber and his assistants are constantly reminding him where to stand on defense during games.
Some of that might be due to the fact that he missed most of the summer with an injury.
He has the potential to become a good defensive player.
For now, it seems like he has carved out enough of an offensive role to remain in the starting lineup. Sloan had a career-high 17 points, five assists and four rebounds against Kansas.
There is no concern in that department.
Incoming freshmen Nijel Pack, Luke Kasubke, Selton Miguel and Davion Bradford all signed national letters of intent to play for the Wildcats in the fall. And UTEP transfer Kaosi Ezeagu is already on the team.
Those are all binding commitments. K-State has a top 25 recruiting class on the way.
Weber has said he is still looking to add two more players to K-State’s 2020 recruiting class. So a losing season could potentially make it hard for the Wildcats to attract new players. But in a weird way it could also help by showing high school seniors that they have a path to early playing time.
K-State hosted four-star wing Donovan Williams last week. He is considering K-State along with Texas, Oklahoma State and several others. Recruiting doesn’t seem like a problem at this point.
Xavier Sneed doesn’t strike me as a NBA-ready player, at the moment.
He’s having a good but not great senior season. His outside shot and handle probably need to improve before he makes it in the league. Odds are he starts out in the G League or plays somewhere overseas next season, but you never know. All it takes is one team to really like him. He is one heck of an athlete. He also plays strong defense. There’s a chance he could find a NBA home sooner rather than later.
I think most people are fine with the existence and use of Bruce Weber’s Play Hard Chart.
Most schools across the Big 12 track hustle plays in some shape or form. So it’s not unique to K-State.
But Weber is the only coach in the conference that references it after games. When a coach does that after a loss, it comes off as weird.
They beat us on the scoreboard, which everyone cares about, but we won on the Play Hard Chart, which only I care enough about to mention.
See what I mean? A few years back, some PR folks advised Weber to stop mentioning the Play Hard Chart so often and he has since cut back.
ESPN announced last week that Kansas State’s much-complained-about game at Oklahoma State was the most watched football game on ESPN+ last year. Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby has said the streaming audience was 450,000.
That’s actually bigger than what K-State had for games on cable TV against Kansas and Baylor last year, so it’s an encouraging sign for ESPN and the Big 12, assuming the production quality improves the next time a conference game is carried on ESPN+.
The second-most viewed game on ESPN+ last season was West Virginia at Kansas. That’s also a good sign.
More and more people are consuming their media through streaming devices, and having a streaming only network with ESPN could eventually become a financial boon for the Big 12. Right now, though, the conference isn’t making money off its relationship with ESPN+.
The next hurdle that the Big 12 and ESPN need to clear when it comes to streaming games is how to handle it in public settings. No one at ESPN or the Big 12 is going to complain if a bar or restaurant streams one of their games, but that isn’t technically allowed right now.
There are also people in rural areas that don’t have a strong enough internet connection to properly stream games. And that’s always going to be an issue.
ESPN+ got off to a rocky start, with fans at both KU and K-State complaining about it at various points this year. But the production quality has seemed to improve during basketball season. Once more people get used to it, there will probably be fewer complaints. Bundling it with Disney+ and Hulu+ is going to become common.
Like it or not, there figures to be even more Big 12 games on ESPN+ next year. This was just the start.
You’re right. the new baseball locker room at K-State does look great.
A facility like that will certainly help with recruiting moving forward. In a sport like college baseball, where very few student-athletes are on a full scholarship, facilities probably matter a great deal.
I’m expecting the K-State baseball team to improve on Pete Hughes’ first season in Manhattan, which finished with a 25-33 record and an eighth-place finish in the Big 12. The freshmen pitchers he relied upon last season will be a year older and more experienced. I don’t know if the Wildcats are ready for a regional just yet, but it won’t shock me if they get there.
Here’s all you need to know about my potential as a NFL scout: I wasn’t sold on Patrick Mahomes when he was coming out of Texas Tech.
It was obvious he had the potential to become a great quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs, but he didn’t win many games with the Red Raiders and every previous passer that had come out of Lubbock amounted to nothing in the NFL.
I didn’t think it was foolish for the Chiefs to draft him in the first round. But I didn’t think it was brilliant, either. And now he’s got Kansas City in the Super Bowl. Shows what I know.
That being said, here are the top five college players I knew were heading toward NFL stardom (and achieved it) when I covered them in college:
1. Adrian Peterson.
2. Aqib Talib.
3. Ndamukong Suh.
4. Von Miller.
5. Tyler Lockett.
And here are the top five college players I thought were heading toward NFL stardom but underachieved at the next level:
1. Robert Griffin III.
2. Arthur Brown.
3. David Sills.
4. Jace Amaro.
5. Vince Young.
Fingers crossed!
If anyone can convince Whataburger to expand north of Oklahoma, it’s Patrick Mahomes.
This story was originally published January 24, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "K-State Q&A: Sunflower Showdown brawl fallout, future Big 12 games on ESPN+ and more."