Bruce Weber on why transfers have become a recruiting priority for his K-State team
The Kansas State men’s basketball team added a transfer to its roster Tuesday morning. Bruce Weber said there was a good chance it would add another transfer later in the week, and the Wildcats did exactly that Tuesday evening. There’s also a chance they will add a third transfer as they continue to explore their recruiting options this spring.
It feels strange for Weber to say those words. The NCAA transfer portal is not his favorite thing. Monitoring it has never been high on his to-do list. He actually hates the growing transfer culture that has surfaced and thinks having more than 1,000 men’s players trying to switch schools in a given year is bad for the game.
But times are changing and he is reluctantly trying to change right along with them. He thanks K-State football coach Chris Klieman for giving him a push in that direction.
“We were in a meeting after they had lost some guys talking about the transfer rules and I told him, ‘We have got to fight this,’” Weber said in a phone conversation with The Eagle. “He looked back at me and said, ‘No, we’ve got to embrace it. It’s part of the game now and you have to go with it.’ I guess that is what we have got to do.”
So far, Weber’s cannonball into the transfer waters has made a splash for the Wildcats.
K-State secured a commitment from the highest profile transfer of the Weber era on Tuesday when Missouri senior guard Mark Smith announced plans to finish his college career with the Wildcats. After stints with both the Tigers and Illinois, he will bring 80 games of starting experience to Manhattan as a “super senior” graduate transfer who will be expected to make an immediate impact next season as both a scorer and as a locker-room leader.
Later, K-State landed the services of Arkansas-Little Rock junior guard Markquis Nowell, a 5-foot-7 playmaker who averaged 16.3 points and five assists while playing in 68 games for his former school.
Transfers seemed to be hurting K-State earlier this month when Antonio Gordon, DaJuan Gordon, Joe Petrakis and Rudi Williams all announced plans to leave the team. But now transfers are providing optimism.
Weber is on his way to replacing transfers with, well, transfers.
As mentioned above, that has never been his strategy. But he’s cautiously optimistic it can now work.
“I told our guys in Kansas City when we’re back there next year we want to feel like we have an NCAA Tournament bid locked down,” Weber said. “That’s got to be our goal. If we would have played the way we did at the end of the season, we would have been up in the mix for that this year. It took us a long time to get to that point, but we made big strides. Now can we get everything organized and add some new pieces that makes the whole thing mix together even better? I think we’re off to a good start.”
K-State only won nine games last year, but Weber is feeling good about the future. He said all nine of K-State’s returning scholarship players are back working out together. Things can always change, but, as of now, he is not expecting any more outgoing transfers.
Weber made it clear that the Wildcats were looking for transfer guards who can shoot well from the perimeter, make plays for themselves on offense and provide veteran leadership.
Smith checks all those boxes. So does Nowell.
K-State lost 21.1 points, 14.4 rebounds and 3.7 assists per game when it lost four transfers. It’s not hard to see Smith replacing half that production himself after averaging 9.7 points, 3.2 rebounds and 1.0 assists at Missouri last season. Add Nowell’s numbers from UALR, and the Wildcats might have more production than they did previously.
Still, Weber has never had the best luck with transfers. He has only landed four other transfers straight from another Division I roster while at K-State. They are: Justin Edwards (Maine), Brandon Bolden (Georgetown), Mawdo Sallah (Mount St. Mary’s) and Kaosi Ezeagu (UTEP).
Edwards turned out to be a solid addition and Ezeagu has potential in K-State’s front court. The other two didn’t do much of anything.
Weber said the Wildcats have tried to recruit other transfers, and have even picked up silent commitments from a few graduate transfers over the years. But those plans disintegrated when those players were denied entrance into their K-State grad school of choice.
“We’ve done it before, we just haven’t had good fortune,” Weber said. “I promise you, it’s not like we haven’t tried it.”
Throughout his nine years with the Wildcats, Weber has leaned mostly on high school recruits. That strategy paid off when star players like Barry Brown, Kamau Stokes and Dean Wade stayed together for four full years. That trio led K-State to three straight NCAA Tournaments and one Big 12 championship. But they were more of the exception than the rule.
Player retention has never been Weber’s forte. Mike McGuirl was the only senior on last year’s roster, which featured eight newcomers. No wonder they struggled so mightily before winning four of their final six games.
The roster will be older next season, though. McGuirl and Smith will both be “super seniors,” Montavious Murphy, Carlton Linguard, Ezeagu and Nowell will be juniors and the Wildcats have one more open scholarship, which could go to another upperclassmen transfer. Though Weber said he will be selective with the team’s final scholarship and may leave it open because he worries about keeping 14 players happy.
But he won’t hesitate to add more transfers if the right players become available.
One of his returning players is also encouraging him to change with the times.
“Mike McGuirl called me yesterday and said, ‘We need to get another guy, Coach,’” Weber said. “We got one and he was pretty happy about it. He’s coming back to not only have a good year, he wants to win. We do too. He wants to make sure we have enough ammunition to go to war. He’s excited about it and so are we.”
This story was originally published March 30, 2021 at 3:53 PM with the headline "Bruce Weber on why transfers have become a recruiting priority for his K-State team."