Jerome Tang left K-State with no other option — and not because of the results
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- K-State parted ways with Jerome Tang after a collapse and public missteps.
- Administration cited Tang’s public statements about student‑athletes as cause.
- The $18.7M buyout will likely be contested as K‑State claims cause.
The first Jerome Tang season in Manhattan took the Wildcats from the Little Apple to the Big Apple — for just their third Elite Eight appearance in the past 35 years.
Six months later, as Tang signed a rich contract extension, he declared his debut season “just the start.”
Instead, it was the peak.
The collapse was hard and sudden.
The public unraveling? Even more so.
Kansas State parted ways with Tang on Sunday night after a turbulent three-year stretch that, by the end, took a backseat to the eye-roll of excuses he provided for the turbulence.
That contract he signed three years ago had transformed from a building block into the only stumbling block to making a change. An $18.7 million buyout will now become the object of a fight between lawyers as K-State appears ready to argue it fired Tang for cause. Whether it’s for cause or not, in recent weeks Tang had made the necessity of his departure for certain.
The question was not whether they could afford the $18.7 million buyout but something to the contrary.
How could they afford to keep him?
Tang was 45-47 since that opening season and 19-32 in Big 12 Conference play.
But he will not be remembered strictly for the fall from the peak, but rather for the response to it.
Over the last few weeks, Tang pointed the finger in every direction — the system, the media for twisting his words while chasing clickbait, the players he recruited who no longer deserved to wear the uniform.
Everyone.
Except the man in charge.
Himself.
In Alabama earlier this season, a judge initially allowed a former two-way NBA player to participate this season before another court reversed the ruling.
A former UCLA player, after declaring for the draft and appearing in NBA games, planned to monopolize that ruling and try to make a return to college.
It’s absurd.
It needs to be fixed.
It’s a crisis.
What it’s not: an excuse.
The entire NCAA landscape is having to navigate the constant confusion, not just the coach in Manhattan. But the coach in Manhattan used it as an excuse.
In the end, it became one of many.
In his the-system-is-the-problem soliloquy, Tang conveniently forgot to mention his decision to pay Coleman Hawkins a reported $2 million for 10.7 points per game a year ago or his decision to hinge the success of this year’s team on the ability of P.J. Haggerty to carry the load in his fourth stop in four years.
Tang sure wasn’t shy before the season with his flattery of this group — declaring he has the best point guard, the best shooter and the best athlete in the country. Either he couldn’t identify his own talent, or didn’t coach it well enough.
That wasn’t mentioned, either.
This excuse was: A week after the system was the problem, Tang seemed almost proud of a 34-point loss to Iowa State, and then accused the media of preparing to twist his words “so you can get the clicks you need.”
“I’m not happy with the results, but I am proud of the young men that we brought in,” he said.
So proud, in fact, that he said a week later those young men didn’t deserve to wear the K-State uniform and then insisted midseason most of them wouldn’t wear the uniform the next year.
So much for that pride, huh?
Yet another few days later, after Sunday’s loss in Houston, he determined the players were “turning the corner on understanding what it means to wear Kansas State on your chest.”
The players turning the corner?
It felt more like the coach running in circles.
Tang loved the players before the year, reinforced his love for them in the face of the media’s propensity for clickbait, loathed them to the point of saying they wouldn’t be back at K-State a year from now, and then loved them again.
If it was all purely some sort of motivational ploy — he also stripped the last names from the back of their jerseys for Saturday’s game — it must have been taken straight from a Disney movie. But it came absent the fairytale ending. In the real world, his players had to see through its hot-and-cold absurdity.
He had correctly identified a problem: Earlier this week against Cincinnati, it looked as though the players had quit on him.
But he somehow missed the root of why.
They certainly must have seen the spasmodic messages for what they were — far closer to desperation that motivation. Which, really, isn’t that the point? Things did get desperate. K-State was 1-11 in conference play.
And yet a time when the program needed leadership more than ever, the response somehow stood out more than the 1-11 conference record.
The response is reportedly the basis for which K-State will apparently try to recoup some of the $18.7 million.
“What he said about the student-athletes really concerned me,” athletic director Gene Taylor said late Sunday in a brief news conference. He said he later asked Tang, “How’d you come up with that?”
It was all enough to prompt Taylor not only to move on but to not even let Tang finish the regular season. The only advantage of a midseason shakeup — other than the looming fight over the two words, “for cause” — is to halt the embarrassment.
That’s not a reference to the results, which is saying a lot for a 1-11 Big 12 record.
It’s a reference to the response to them.
Tang couldn’t sit back and wait on a system to change and finally break his way, because it breaks nobody’s way.
He couldn’t expect the right players would magically fall into his lap, because it’s well within his control to recruit the right fits.
And he couldn’t expect the media to stop covering the collapse, particularly when he so readily provided this kind of material.
The initial two might’ve put Tang on the proverbial hot seat.
The last piece — the material that overtook his late-season news conferences — made it necessary they strip the seat from him altogether.
He spent a lot of time trying to distance himself from the responsibility of Kansas State hitting rock bottom.
Instead, K-State will distance itself from him.
This story was originally published February 15, 2026 at 9:26 PM with the headline "Jerome Tang left K-State with no other option — and not because of the results."