Bruce Weber confident K-State will bounce back, but staying power remains a challenge
As Kansas State basketball coach Bruce Weber shifts his focus away from the least successful season of his lengthy career and begins working on ways to return the Wildcats to future NCAA Tournaments, he can’t help but recall some words of wisdom that Dean Smith shared at a coaching clinic nearly 40 years ago.
The topic was sustaining success in the topsy-turvy world of college basketball. Smith’s advice revolved around balanced recruiting classes of no more than four players. As long as every incoming group is roughly the same size, Weber recalls the late North Carolina coach saying, your teams will always have a shot at doing something special.
Weber wishes things were still that simple.
“It’s really tough to do that now,” Weber said in a phone interview. “That is probably one of the most difficult things to do in this day and age, because kids are moving and the transfer has become much more common. College basketball has changed.”
That is one way to explain both the volatile nature of the sport and Weber’s own roller-coaster results with the Wildcats.
After eight years in Manhattan, Weber has guided K-State to some of its best seasons in school history but also its worst season in decades. He has won a pair of Big 12 championships and reached one Elite Eight, but he has also failed to advance beyond the first round of the NCAA Tournament seven times.
Some view him as the best coach on campus. Others see him as the wrong kind of goat.
He’s excellent at finding success. Sustaining it? Not so much.
“I think it is tough to maintain,” Weber said. “You have to have the right culture. One thing (Texas Tech coach) Chris Beard said to me a few years ago was the best teams get old and stay old. But can you do that? It just takes time with most young guys. There are some elite freshmen that can help right away, but those are so few.”
Second time around
This is the second time Weber has attempted to rebuild his K-State team from the ground up following a disastrous season. Things worked out for him the first time, as he hit the reset button with Barry Brown, Kamau Stokes and Dean Wade five years ago. That group paved the way for many of the highlights listed above.
Now, coming off an 11-21 season and a last-place Big 12 finish, Weber is putting his hopes in another large recruiting class that will include at least six players. The group ranks 14th nationally, per Rivals, and has the look of Weber’s finest recruiting class yet at K-State.
Nijel Pack is a four-star point guard, Selton Miguel is a gifted scorer on the wing, Luke Kasubke is a talented shooter, Davion Bradford brings valuable size, Seryee Lewis has lots of athleticism and UTEP transfer Kaosi Ezeagu is an impressive shot-blocker.
The Wildcats recruited more prospects than originally planned because three players opted to transfer. They might also add one more recruit this spring: Cartier Diarra is mulling over his professional options.
Whatever happens, Weber thinks his incoming players “are a little bit ahead” of where Brown, Stokes and Wade were as high school seniors. With DaJaun Gordon, Montavious Murphy and Antonio Gordon returning as sophomores and Mike McGuirl back as a senior, there is reason to be optimistic about the future in Manhattan.
Still, the Wildcats won’t have a collection of eight upperclassmen to lead the way next season, as Smith once advised.
“We are going to have to depend on a lot of young guys,” Weber said, “but you hope that the guys who are returning can understand what we went through and how we have to take a step and understand that they need to help those younger guys get bought into what we are doing and see if some of them can become major factors.”
A growing problem
Some disgruntled fans view Weber’s second rebuilding attempt as a problem that is unique to K-State, but it’s becoming a common issue in college basketball.
Few programs are immune to down years. Within the Big 12, a different team has finished at the bottom of the standings for six straight seasons. Only Kansas has reached the NCAA Tournament every year since 2016.
On a more national level, even North Carolina was down this year, finishing 14-19.
“It’s so hard for most schools to reload quickly when you lose three guys like Kansas State,” CBS college basketball analyst Steve Lappas said. “That is just the way college basketball is nowadays.
“Some schools are getting McDonald’s All-Americans every year, like Kansas and Kentucky. I would normally say North Carolina, too, but look at them right now. I don’t know that you can do that at Kansas State. You never have. It’s been a good program, but their success is built on guys who come in and develop.”
That’s one of the reasons why K-State athletic director Gene Taylor remains “very confident” in the future of Wildcats basketball.
He witnessed the up-and-down nature of the sport while he worked as a deputy AD at Iowa. Fran McCaffrey has won 194 games with the Hawkeyes over 10 years, but two of those seasons finished with losing records. They both preceded better days.
“When you build a program the right way, and you have high school kids who turn into what Barry Brown and Dean Wade were for us, you are going to have three years of success and then they graduate,” Taylor said. “You have to start over. You are going to have a down year. Now we have to rebuild. That is just kind of the trend and it will probably increase like that if the NBA gets rid of the one-and-done rule.”
Looking back and ahead
K-State entered this past season picked to finish ninth in the preseason Big 12 poll, but there was hope the Wildcats could contend for March Madness with Xavier Sneed and Makol Mawien back as seniors.
Weber thinks his team was good enough to finish in the middle of the standings, but after years of relying on Brown, Stokes and Wade to make every important shot, no one was ready to take control in crunch time.
Weber says DaJaun Gordon was heading in that direction and hopes a recent knee procedure will help him be that guy next season. Weber was also encouraged by the way McGuirl led K-State to a win over TCU in its final game at the Big 12 tournament.
“At least we ended with some positive feelings,” Weber said.
The Wildcats bottomed out this season. Now they are in rebuilding mode, again. Weber’s track record suggests they won’t be down for long, but they may not be up for an extended run, either.
This story was originally published March 25, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Bruce Weber confident K-State will bounce back, but staying power remains a challenge."