Kansas State Wildcats blow big lead, beat West Virginia in overtime: 3 takeaways
The Kansas State men’s basketball team experienced every possible emotion during a 94-90 overtime victory against West Virginia on Monday at Bramlage Coliseum.
For much of the game, joy filled the arena as the Wildcats drained 3-pointers and built what felt like an insurmountable lead of 25 points against the Mountaineers. But pain, agony and stress quickly followed as they coughed up their advantage and nearly lost to a team that entered the day without a single road win this season.
K-State survived after scoring the final four points in regulation and then pulling away like it always does in overtime under head coach Jerome Tang. He improved to 12-0 overall and 7-0 this season in overtime games. The Wildcats now own the Division I record for most OT wins in a single season.
That’s the good news. The Wildcats got a much-needed conference win. The bad news: they made things difficult on themselves.
“It was a tale of two halves,” Tang said. “You guys were probably thinking, ‘Yeah, those are the Cats we thought they could be sometimes. We have seen glimpses of it.’ Then in the second half you said, ‘Yeah, those are the Cats we’ve seen a whole bunch of this year, too.’”
A loss would have gone down as the biggest blown lead in program history. The record is 20 points.
How did it all happen? Tang, players and fans will be trying to figure that out for a while.
The Wildcats raced to a 48-26 halftime lead thanks to a whopping 11 made 3-pointers on just 19 attempts. Then they pulled ahead 66-41 midway through the second half. The game seemed over.
But the Mountaineers had other ideas. They kept fighting, got hot from the outside and made things so interesting that they surged ahead 79-75 in the final minute of regulation.
“There were times when I thought we were playing not to lose,” Tang said. “We got a little tight. Whether it was my play-calls or our demeanor in the huddles, I will have to look at that. But we got it to overtime and I liked the look in their eyes when the buzzer sounded. We knew we were going to overtime and I was looking at guys that knew they were going to win.”
Senior guard Tylor Perry had to drain a pair of free throws on K-State’s final possession to force overtime. Fortunately for the Wildcats, he was calm and collected all night as he scored a season-high 29 points.
This was probably his best game in a K-State uniform: He drained six shots from beyond the arc and also connected on nine of 10 shots from the free-throw line.
“We’ve been in these positions millions of times,” Perry said. “It’s not really about being nervous no more. It’s about just being locked in to who you are. I think we did a very good job of that in the last minute and overtime.”
K-State (17-11, 7-8 Big 12) needed every single point that Perry could muster. West Virginia (9-19, 4-11 Big 12) responded with 28 points from RaeQuan Battle and 25 from Kerr Kriisa.
The Wildcats have now won back-to-back games and will look to continue their winning streak on Saturday at Cincinnati.
Until then, here are some takeaways from Monday’s action against West Virginia:
The NCAA Tournament is back in play for K-State
A glimmer of hope has returned for Kansas State’s chances of reaching the NCAA Tournament.
After winning back-to-back games, the Wildcats are once again back on the March Madness bubble. If the season ended today, they would not earn a spot on the bracket. Much work remains if they want that to happen in a few weeks.
But it is not impossible, like it appeared last week.
The Wildcats close out the regular season with three straight opportunities to boost their postseason resume with impressive wins. The journey begins on Saturday with a road game against Cincinnati. After that, K-State will head to Kansas for a challenging road game and then host Iowa State on senior day.
If Tang’s team can win two of those games it will have a golden opportunity to play its way into the Big Dance during the Big 12 Tournament in Kansas City.
It’s not an easy task. Winning road games in the Big 12 is always daunting, and Iowa State is ranked inside the top 10. But if K-State can continue to play the way it did in its past two games, fans will have a reason to dream.
The Wildcats showed a lack of maturity in second half
For all intents and purposes, this game was over at halftime.
The odds of West Virginia, a team that hasn’t won a single road game all season, mounting a 22-point comeback against K-State were astronomically long. But nobody told the Mountaineers that, and they displayed fight at the beginning of the second half by scoring five straight points out of the locker room.
K-State clearly wasn’t playing with intensity, and Tang called a timeout to change that.
His strategy worked to perfection. The Wildcats emerged from the huddle with renewed focus and responded with an 18-10 run to pull ahead by 25. Now the game really appeared to be over.
And yet, it wasn’t. Not by a long shot.
Somehow, K-State trailed by four in the final minute of regulation. It was the definition of a choke job from the home team. They stopped playing hard and West Virginia kept fighting. What should have been a blowout victory turned into an absolute nailbiter.
That is not what mature teams do.
K-State doesn’t have enough talent to sleepwalk through even a few minutes of games. Never was that more obvious than in this contest.
K-State was red-hot from 3-point range in the first half
West Virginia coach Josh Eilert spent much of the first half shaking his head in frustration as he watched his men’s basketball team get pummeled by Kansas State.
His frustration was understandable.
The Wildcats played arguably their finest half of the entire season, and the Mountaineers were no match for them.
It was all smiles everywhere else in the arena. This was the version of K-State that fans caught a glimpse of when the Wildcats started 4-1 in conference play ... but then seemed to disappear when they lost seven of their next eight.
They are still capable of playing at a high level, especially at home against an opponent they match up well against like WVU.
K-State threatened to put this game away early by making a whopping 11 3-pointers (on 19 attempts) in the first half. The Wildcats entered the day ranked outside the top 300 nationally in 3-point shooting and the Mountaineers tried to take advantage of that weakness by playing a zone defense. But K-State made them pay with red-hot shooting and entered the locker room up 48-26 at halftime.
The Wildcats went on to make a season best 15 three-pointers in the game. To put that number in perspective, they hadn’t even made 10 in a game this month.
Perry led the way with six 3-pointers, freshman guard Dai Dai Ames made three, Cam Carter and Arthur Kaluma made two apiece and David N’Guessan and RJ Jones both made one.
This was a welcome change for a team that has struggled far too often to make shots from beyond the arc.
This story was originally published February 26, 2024 at 8:52 PM with the headline "Kansas State Wildcats blow big lead, beat West Virginia in overtime: 3 takeaways."