Kansas State hoping to make history at Big 12 Tournament after lousy regular season
Kansas State basketball players have been ready for the Big 12 Tournament to start for quite some time. No matter how poorly things got for the Wildcats this season, they always viewed their upcoming trip to Sprint Center as their shot at redemption.
This is their path to the NCAA Tournament.
That provides them with an abundance of motivation, even though they are longshots. K-State’s odds of winning the Big 12 Tournament, something it has never done, are 125-to-1 this week. The Cats will need to win four games in four days to make it happen. That won’t be easy for a team that hasn’t won consecutive games since November.
Still, this team is heading to Kansas City with the highest of aspirations.
“Hopefully,” senior swingman Xavier Sneed said, “we can get four in a row.”
K-State coach Bruce Weber is taking the Big 12 Tournament so seriously that he swatted down a suggestion that the Wildcats won’t have anything to lose as they enter the competition as the No. 10 seed and will face No. 7 seed TCU at about 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday.
“I think there’s a lot to lose,” Weber said. “You’re done (if you lose). Our whole thing is that this is our last opportunity. You have a lot of dreams and hopes coming into the season. Things didn’t work out like we had hoped. Now, you have one last opportunity to step up and leave a little bit of a special legacy.”
Some quick history: No team has won the Big 12 Tournament after playing on the event’s opening day.
In its current setup, the bottom four seeds play each other in the first round of the tournament while the top six seeds rest and then take the court in the quarterfinals. When the Big 12 had a full roster of 12 members, the bottom eight teams played in the first round and the top four teams earned byes.
Only four teams have won three games in three days and then played for a championship. It happened in 2014 with No. 7 Baylor, which lost to Iowa State. The Bears also made a run to the tournament final in 2009 as a No. 9 seed before losing to Missouri. Oklahoma State made it to the final as a No. 5 seed in 1998 and Missouri made it there in 1997 as a No. 10 seed.
Weber also has some history with taking an underdog team to the finals of a conference championship. In 2008, Illinois finished the regular season 13-18 and finished 10th in the Big Ten standings. But it found a way to win games against Penn State, Purdue and Minnesota before falling to Wisconsin with a NCAA Tournament berth at stake.
He shared stories from that tournament run with K-State players this week.
Maybe that will help. Maybe it won’t.
Either way, K-State and Weber will need to make history to keep their season alive beyond this week.
For now, the Wildcats’ focus is on the Horned Frogs, who defeated them twice during the regular season. TCU won 59-57 at Bramlage Coliseum and then 68-57 in the rematch.
“They had a positive game on Saturday,” Weber said. “Obviously, Xavier played well. It was great for Pierson McAtee to come in and do some of that stuff, Levi played his butt off. I thought our guards were very, very solid.
“Now, can we match that and we’re going to have to play a little better. Jamie (Dixon) has done a nice job with that group. They’ve won a lot of tough, close games. Obviously, they lost the last one and a heartbreaker. We’re just going to have to play at a high level.”
This story was originally published March 10, 2020 at 11:56 AM with the headline "Kansas State hoping to make history at Big 12 Tournament after lousy regular season."