Brad Underwood casts shadow over Bruce Weber’s pivotal season

First-year Oklahoma State basketball coach Brad Underwood walked into the Big 12 media day jamboree at the Sprint Center, and all of a sudden it felt like Throwback Tuesday.

As if out of central casting, Underwood exudes a square-jawed, rugged, good-humored embodiment of the old Big Eight.

It’s affirmed by pedigree: For starters, he’s a descendant of the Henry Iba tree via Jack Hartman coaching him at Kansas State — an identity Underwood’s three Oklahoma State players here Tuesday confirmed, noting his obsession with defense.

Growing up in McPherson, Kan., Underwood regularly watched the Big Eight game of the week and traveled to Kansas City for conference holiday tournaments and NAIA tourneys held in a place, he says, that “engulfs basketball.”

Moreover, his upbringing evokes the birthplaces of native Kansan coaching greats who first played in the league: Dean Smith (Emporia/Kansas), Adolph Rupp (Halstead/KU), Eddie Sutton (Bucklin/Oklahoma State), Gene Keady (Larned/K-State) and Lon Kruger (Silver Lake/K-State).

Those Big Eight tentacles extend everywhere, including to Kansas coach Bill Self hosting Underwood on a recruiting trip to Oklahoma State when Self was playing there in the early 1980s.

“Thank God for Oklahoma State, Brad is a much better coach than he was a player,” Self said, smiling. “He was actually a guy I hoped that we could sign because I didn’t think (he) would take away many minutes.”

So that in part explains how Underwood, who jokes now that he’s going to ask Self for donations to his alma mater, ended up playing at K-State.

Years later, Underwood was hired by Bob Huggins to be a K-State assistant coach before Huggins left in 2007 for West Virginia and his own hometown of Morgantown.

A “no-brainer,” Huggins called that hire Tuesday, “because Brad was a K-Stater, which was really important. He’s a Kansas native, which is really important.

“And I needed somebody on the staff … to be able to kind of link the past with the present.”

All of which jolts us back to the present Tuesday and a certain awkwardness in the air.

It was best symbolized by the seating between Huggins and Underwood of Kansas State coach Bruce Weber, the lingering link between the Huggins era at K-State and the fan clamor for Underwood in the spring encapsulated in the #BringBackBrad movement.

That uprising came despite the fact that the job wasn’t open no matter how much at least a vocal faction of K-State fans wanted Weber dumped amid a 5-13 conference season.

Plenty of those voices of dissent have felt that way since the day Weber was hired, in part out of protest over the perception athletic director John Currie was the reason for the departure of Frank Martin, Huggins’ successor.

Thus, it might also be reasonably surmised that some anti-Weber sentiment will remain even if he takes the Wildcats back into the NCAA Tournament this season — which he likely has to do to keep his job.

Harsh as the detractors might sound, unwilling to give a good man a chance as some are, at least part of the current mindset isn’t hard to understand.

After all, Weber is 23-31 in conference play since his first team tied Kansas for the 2012-13 regular-season Big 12 title …

Just as the prototype for what many K-State fans really want surfaced in the form of the 52-year-old Underwood.

Last season, he made a burgeoning resume (53-1 in Southland Conference games) irresistible when he guided his 14th-seeded Stephen F. Austin team to an upset over Huggins’ third-seeded Mountaineers in the NCAA Tournament.

Instead, here is Underwood embracing and talking about the heritage and tradition of … Oklahoma State.

“I still get goosebumps and (the) hair on the back of my neck stands up when I walk into Gallagher-Iba (Arena) every day,” he said.

Just the same, he isn’t relishing his return to Manhattan on Feb. 22. And not just because he’ll have to remember to turn a different direction from the tunnel entrance to the correct locker room.

“When I left Kansas State with Frank to go to South Carolina … we left Kansas State with our head held high, and I was very, very proud,” he said. “I’ve got dear friends there, and I’m sure it’s going to be emotional.”

In a hallway later, between the dizzying interview rounds coaches were making, Underwood was asked if the trip would be further complicated for him with the knowledge he was a popular candidate for a job that wasn’t available.

He briefly acknowledged hearing that after the fact.

Then he deftly pivoted away from the loaded question and called Weber a “terrific coach” he wishes nothing but the best for …

“Other than when he’s going against the orange,” Underwood said, looking down at his corresponding tie.

It’s easy to see the appeal in Underwood, who is proud of his roots in McPherson — which he wants you to know is pronounced “Mc-Furson.”

“There’s no ‘fear’ in McPherson,” he said, laughing and adding, “I learned how to work. I learned how to respect people. I learned how to become friends and have friends.”

He projects sincerity in person and even on Twitter, where he posts his own tweets — typos and all.

Because, he says, “I don’t think I’m anybody who needs to have anybody else doing my tweets … That’s kind of who I am, I guess.”

He’s also an emotional man, which surfaces promptly when conversation turns to Tyrek Coger, the Oklahoma State player who died because of complications from an enlarged heart just 17 days after arriving on campus this summer.

“I don’t know if you ever get over anything like that,” he said. “Our team will never forget him. I’ll never let them forget him.

“He was a Cowboy.”

So is Underwood now.

Back in the conference where he belongs just at the right time for him … but at a delicate one for Weber as he confronts his own ultimate fit.

This story was originally published October 25, 2016 at 5:47 PM with the headline "Brad Underwood casts shadow over Bruce Weber’s pivotal season."