Bruce Weber thinks Big 12/SEC Challenge has been good for K-State basketball
Kansas State basketball coach Bruce Weber is a fan of the Big 12/SEC Challenge and is looking forward to starting a similar scheduling arrangement with the Big East next season.
There are two main reasons why.
He thinks those games bring extra publicity to Big 12 basketball, and he likes the way those games help K-State schedule more quality nonconference matchups at Bramlage Coliseum.
Let’s start with the spotlight the Big 12/SEC Challenge puts on the conference. He says that’s the main reason Big 12 coaches were on board with the challenge when it began six years ago.
ESPN has gone out of its way to make the event feel like a big deal since it moved to late January in 2015. If you watched college basketball this week, you surely saw a commercial for Kansas at Kentucky and the other nine games in the challenge that will be played Saturday.
“When they first proposed it for our coaches, we said, ‘This is great,’” Weber said. “Kansas gets the notoriety, but not our league as a whole ... We get publicity, the (NCAA Tournament selection) committee has said it’s a good thing. Now, you have to go win. But we have been fortunate to win or tie them every year.”
If it was up to Weber, he would prefer the games be moved back to December. He says the double round robin schedule used by the Big 12 is a grind, and adding a SEC game in the middle of it can make it feel even tougher.
But the challenge seems to fall at a good time for K-State this season. The Wildcats have won five straight games and can continue that momentum by beating a struggling Texas A&M team they will be favored to defeat on the road.
K-State will then get a week off to prepare for a road game at Oklahoma State before hosting Kansas and finishing the season with 10 straight Big 12 games.
“It’s a nice little break from the Big 12,” K-State guard Barry Brown said. “We can focus on a different team we haven’t seen, a good team. Playing against someone you haven’t played against is refreshing.”
Things have gone well enough that K-State will experience two conference challenges next season when it hosts Marquette in the inaugural Big 12/Big East Challenge.
That will be an attractive home game before the start of conference play, something the Wildcats have found difficult to schedule in recent years.
Weber hopes K-State can work out an arrangement where it alternates road and home games between the conference challenges so the Wildcats will get an extra quality opponent at Bramlage Coliseum each season.
“When the other leagues went to 20 (conference games) I know I called our administration and said, ‘We need to find another one,’” Weber said. “A lot of other coaches said the same thing. Kansas and Texas, it seems like they can always get games. But other people can’t get the tough games or home games, because we’re tougher to get to sometimes.”
This story was originally published January 25, 2019 at 3:00 PM.