K-State Q&A: Bruce Weber, Brad Underwood, early coaching search predictions and more
It’s time for another K-State Q&A.
Bruce Weber stepped down as men’s basketball coach Thursday. Now the Wildcats are searching for his replacement. There is no shortage of topics to discuss this week, so let’s dive right into your questions.
Thank you, as always, for providing them.
I shared a list of seven potential candidates on Thursday. You should give that a read if you want more info on each name.
But I’m happy to rank the top five candidates here.
Right now, I would list them in the following order ...
1. Brad Underwood, Illinois.
2. Grant McCasland, North Texas.
3. Jerome Tang (associate head coach), Baylor.
4. Niko Medved, Colorado State.
5. Darian DeVries, Drake.
Underwood is the dream candidate. He blows every other coach out of the water if he’s interested and K-State can afford him. Those are two pretty big ifs, but for now he tops the list.
McCasland seems like the most realistic candidate after Underwood. K-State administrators really like him. He’s winning at North Texas, he played at Baylor and he used to coach in the Big 12. And he’s affordable. He checks a lot of boxes.
Several K-State folks connected to the search have labeled him as “a great fit.”
I can assure you that Kansas State has already used back channels to find out if Brad Underwood is interested in coming home.
It would be malpractice by the athletics director to completely ignore the top candidate on the board, even if convincing him to leave Illinois feels like a Hail Mary.
As an insider told me you yesterday, “You have to at least try.”
Underwood bolted from Oklahoma State for Illinois after just one season and he may not have the greatest relationship with his athletics director, even though he keeps giving him contract extensions.
Maybe he wants to coach at his alma mater. You might as well start a dialogue.
Will things develop to the point where Gene Taylor is actually speaking directly to Underwood about the K-State job? Not unless Underwood makes it abundantly clear that he wants it. There really isn’t much to talk about.
Either he wants the job and K-State offers it to him or he doesn’t want the job and K-State looks elsewhere. Neither side needs to do any selling.
I imagine K-State will be in contact with Underwood’s agent and then they will go from there.
The problem with Underwood is that he is one of the most expensive coaches on the market and he already has a great thing going at Illinois.
Can the Wildcats pull together enough finances to cover his buyout ($7 million before he signed a recent extension) and afford his $4.1 million salary? Does Underwood want to leave a place where he’s coming off back-to-back Big Ten regular season championships and start over at a place that hasn’t posted a winning season since 2019?
Taylor said yesterday that money is most definitely an object in this coaching search and that he wants to have a new coach hired before the Final Four. Those two statements are not what you want to hear from a school looking to poach Underwood.
Everything would have to go perfectly for a marriage to be arranged.
He could want the job and K-State could want to hire him, and it still may not work out.
But to answer your original question, yes, K-State will reach out to Underwood about the opening in some capacity. I’m confident that has already happened, actually.
No, there are plenty of great candidates out there.
I think K-State will be happy with any of the five candidates I listed at the top of this mailbag.
SMU hasn’t been to the NCAA Tournament since 2017 and has only won 20 games once in the past five years.
Tim Jankovich is a good coach with K-State connections, but his resume isn’t strong enough at the moment to be considered with the other top candidates.
He would make a cool associate head coach, if he’s interested in being an assistant again.
I don’t see K-State going from Bruce Weber to someone who has been tangled up in a cheating scandal.
Not happening.
I think K-State fans would be happy to hire a coach with KU and Wichita State connections if he was winning at a high level and it seemed like he could keep doing so in Manhattan.
The problem with Mark Turgeon is that he was recently dismissed by Maryland. His star is fading, not rising.
It may have made sense for him to make the jump to K-State from Wichita State or Texas A&M ... but not now.
It’s a moot question. I haven’t heard his name connected to this search in any capacity.
Yes, retaining Shane Southwell as an assistant coach is very much something that could happen.
Keeping him on staff may help make it easier for players like Nijel Pack, Markquis Nowell, Ismael Massoud and Selton Miguel to stay at K-State and give their all for the next head coach.
It all depends on what the next guy wants, but it seems like fans want Southwell to stay. He seems like a rising star in the business and he has brought in some promising recruits/transfers.
I get the sense that Gene Taylor will strongly recommend him to the next head coach.
Taylor said on Thursday that none of Bruce Weber’s assistants will be considered for the head coach opening, including Southwell.
That is probably a smart plan.
Southwell seems to have a bright future ahead of him and very well could become a great head coach one day. But there are more qualified candidates available, no offense to Jacob Pullen.
It all depends on what the roster looks like.
If Nijel Pack and few other key players stay, the next coach can have the Wildcats in position to reach the NCAA Tournament by simply adding a talented big man via the transfer portal.
If Pack decides to transfer, the next coach will have significantly more work to do.
But the transfer portal changes everything. If the next coach brings in the right guys, K-State could be ready to win next year.
Iowa State didn’t win a single Big 12 game last season. This year, under a new coach, the Cyclones are heading to the NCAA Tournament. I’m not saying that kind of transformation is realistic or attainable for every new head coach, but it is a possibility this day and age.
The problem I had with Bruce Weber’s farewell news conference is that it came after he already dropped the mic a few hours earlier at the Big 12 Tournament.
His 6-minute monologue at T-Mobile Center (in response to a question from yours truly) was extremely well received. It was maybe the first time during his entire tenure at K-State that people were championing him on social media.
No encore was needed.
Holding a surprise farewell news conference the following day was like hitting a hole-in-one and then trying to do it again instead of heading into the clubhouse for drinks.
Why did K-State allow him to do it? Well, the administration felt like he deserved to go out on his terms. They didn’t think a surprise Zoom session with reporters was the best idea in the world, but if it made Weber happy and helped bring about a quick divorce then they weren’t going to stop it from happening.
I can tell you that Weber absolutely loved it when Lon Kruger held a farewell news conference after he retired last year and got to wax poetic about any topic he wanted for an hour while reporters hung on his every word.
He wanted that experience for himself.
His message just wasn’t as well received.
And that’s too bad, because his comments at the Big 12 Tournament brought the house down.
The situation is no different than going on stage for a stand-up routine at a comedy club.
Would you rather follow Jerry Seinfeld or Kenny Bania?
K-State fans loved Frank Martin and hated John Currie. It was always going to be hard for anyone to step into that situation after Martin voluntarily left for South Carolina and Currie brought in his own guy. Maybe fans would have wrapped their arms around Brad Underwood, but Bruce Weber didn’t unite the fan base.
That’s unfortunate. His first seven seasons in Manhattan were good enough to deserve a high approval rating. But he simply couldn’t win over everyone.
The joke I always liked to tell was that Weber could win a national championship at K-State and some fans would have still wanted him gone.
At the same time, he was in a good place with most fans after he took the Wildcats to the Elite Eight and then a Big 12 championship in back-to-back years. Beloved? No. Tolerated? Yes. Had he kept on winning, there would have been less negativity and he could have retired in Manhattan.
But the last three seasons were a slog. It’s definitely time for a change.
The next coach will walk into an easier situation. Fans want new blood. It will be easier for the next guy to unite the fan base. He won’t be following Seinfeld. He will be following Bania.
I would personally love it if Lon Kruger came out of retirement and coached the Wildcats again.
He was always incredibly nice to me while he was at Oklahoma. The guy went out of his way to get to know me, made sure I had his cell phone number and was always available to talk ... and I wasn’t even covering his team!
That came in handy over the years when I wanted his perspective on a bunch of random Big 12 and K-State basketball topics. I remember calling him once out of the blue to talk about lavender uniforms and he was happy to talk all night about them.
He also has open practices and takes his teams to the NCAA Tournament.
He was always nice to me and gracious with his time.
I know the small group of fans that attended his weekly radio show enjoyed being around him because he often thanked them for showing up by paying for their meals. I would call him a nice, normal guy.
The one story that sticks out in my mind is the way his eyes always lit up when he held youth basketball camps over the summer.
Those were like Christmas for him.
I remember there was one year where a kid was in tears because he couldn’t make a free throw at one of his camps. Weber stepped in and personally helped him adjust his shooting form until he was draining them one after another.
“How great is this,” Weber said at the time. “I’m actually getting to do some coaching.”
That story always stuck with me. I really do think Weber is a good basketball coach. He makes his players better and knows everything about the game. But that is sadly just a small part of the job at the college level. Building a roster, recruiting, monitoring the transfer portal, establishing a culture in the locker room and keeping everyone happy can be just as important.
If you stripped away everything else and just let him coach, he was in his element. He just wasn’t the greatest at handling all that other stuff. I think that is why it was hard for him to sustain a consistent level of success.
The season is most definitely over.
This story was originally published March 11, 2022 at 11:43 AM with the headline "K-State Q&A: Bruce Weber, Brad Underwood, early coaching search predictions and more."