K-State Q&A: Chris Klieman’s first 10 games, bowl odds and uninspiring basketball
Chris Klieman is leading the pack.
Four Big 12 football teams hired new coaches before the start of this season, and Klieman is the only one among them that has already secured bowl eligibility. He can clinch the best record in the group by leading Kansas State to a victory over Texas Tech at 6 p.m. Saturday inside AT&T Jones Stadium.
Les Miles is 3-7 at Kansas. Matt Wells is 4-6 at Texas Tech. Neal Brown is 4-6 at West Virginia.
That is all worth remembering as the Wildcats try to bounce back from back-to-back losses, including a face plant against Brown and the Mountaineers as 14-point favorites last week.
K-State has taken an odd path to its 6-4 record. Who would have guessed it would beat Mississippi State and Oklahoma, then lose to West Virginia? But six victories is more than Vegas expected from the Wildcats and exactly what I projected for them in Klieman’s first season.
Fans have twice been over the moon for Klieman (following three-game winning streaks) and twice questioned some of his decisions (following two-game losing streaks), but it’s fair to say he’s exceeded expectations through 10 games.
It’s too early to make any judgments on Klieman. The final two games of the regular season and K-State’s bowl could drastically change how fans view his first year in Manhattan. And we still need to wait a few seasons before we can tell exactly how good or bad of a hire athletic director Gene Taylor made with Klieman.
But he’s off to a good start by at least one standard. He’s on pace to be the best first-year coach in the Big 12.
And with that, it’s time for another K-State Q&A. Let’s get to your questions. Thanks for asking them.
It’s too early to accurately predict anything, but I wrote about K-State’s bowl possibilities earlier this week. You should check that out after you’re finished with this mailbag.
Six postseason games are on the table. I could realistically see the Wildcats playing in the Alamo, Camping World, Texas, Liberty, Cheez-It or First Responder Bowls. Two weeks ago, some really exciting options were on the table when K-State debuted at No. 16 in the playoff rankings, but those are now out of reach.
Even the Alamo and Camping World Bowls seem unlikely following losses to Texas and West Virginia. But stranger things have happened.
My guess, at the moment, is that the Wildcats end up playing in either the Cheez-It Bowl or the Liberty Bowl. It all depends on how they finish in their final two games.
K-State fans can dream a little bit with a pair of victories. A split would probably send the Wildcats to Memphis. A pair of losses will likely leave Phoenix as the best option.
My current Big 12 bowl projections:
Playoff or Sugar: Oklahoma
NY6: Baylor
Alamo: Oklahoma State
Camping World: Iowa State
Texas: Texas
Liberty: Kansas State
Cheez-It: TCU
First Responder: Wild Card
Extra practice will help a good deal, especially for the young players who will get some opportunities to shine in December practices.
I’m careful to never say never when it comes to college football coaches switching jobs, but Chris Klieman leaving Manhattan for a different job after a few years would surprise me.
Klieman seems like a very loyal person, and he has gone out of his way to thank athletic director Gene Taylor for hiring him from North Dakota State and giving him this opportunity. I don’t see him switching jobs unless he was offered something extraordinary, like a shot with a blue-blood program or the NFL.
Maybe that changes if Taylor is no longer around, but he doesn’t view this job as a stepping stone. That’s actually one of the reasons K-State liked him better than other candidates like Mike Norvell, Neal Brown and Seth Littrell during the hiring process.
This doesn’t seem like something K-State fans should worry about. It’s pretty rare that coaches jump from one power-five job to another. But if it does ever happen, it means Klieman did a heck of a job with the Wildcats and they should be set up well to hire someone else.
This might be the year K-State’s draft streak comes to an end.
The Wildcats have a handful of players that could definitely make NFL rosters after going undrafted, but I’m not seeing any surefire draft picks on the roster.
Scott Frantz, Nick Kaltmayer and Reggie Walker look like the most likely draft candidates. If any K-State seniors get drafted, it’s probably going to be one of them. I could see any of them getting selected with a strong pro day.
I suppose you could chalk up some of K-State’s uninspiring play to an incredibly boring schedule that fans can’t get excited about.
At the same time, they have struggled to beat two mediocre opponents and two awful opponents. Would they have any wins against decent competition?
We will probably get a better idea of where Bruce Weber’s team is at next week at the Fort Myers Tipoff when K-State plays Pittsburgh and then Bradley or Northwestern. None of those teams are world-beaters (Pitt lost to Nicholls and Northwestern lost to Radford) but at least they have name recognition.
I have tempered my expectations for K-State basketball a bit after watching its first four games. DaJuan Gordon isn’t yet the plug-and-play scorer I expected him to be and the Wildcats have few consistent offensive weapons outside of Cartier Diarra and Xavier Sneed. This team is going to struggle to score.
They are playing quality defense, though, and I like the look of freshmen forward Montavious Murphy and Antonio Gordon. This team still has potential.
But there will be lots of ups and downs. Things should go better than the 2014-15 season. This looks more like a 2013-14 kind of year where K-State wins 20 games and finishes fifth in the Big 12. K-State will end up closer to the bubble than I originally anticipated.
Cartier Diarra could take over for Barry Brown as a floor general later in the season. The sooner the better.
That was hysterical. I’m not sure exactly what he said before or after those two words, but for one magical moment during K-State’s underwhelming victory over Arkansas-Pine Bluff the crowd at Bramlage Coliseum grew quiet and Bruce Weber could be heard reminding his basketball team to, well, “play basketball.”
It reminded me a little bit of a game a few years back where the Wildcats brought the ball up court on offense, looked to Weber for a play and he just started yelling “score” over and over. He also likes to remind his players to “box out” when other teams are shooting free throws.
Talk about fundamentals.
Some other highlights:
- The time he didn’t like the officiating at Allen Fieldhouse and asked reporters to ask Fran Fraschilla about it. Then Sam Mellinger did ask Fraschilla about it, and he said the officiating was pretty darn good.
- When he said Allen Iverson doesn’t care about practice but “Coach Weber does.”
- The way he blamed every little thing that went wrong for much of the 2014-15 season on jetlag following the Maui Invitational.
- For a while there, it seemed like he really liked to drop movie references into his press conferences, giving shout outs to Caddyshack, Groundhog Day and Austin Powers.
Bless you for having confidence in my reporting skills, but I don’t have enough foresight to tell you which K-State basketball players will elect to transfer or turn pro next April.
Cartier Diarra is the only player that I can see choosing to test the NBA waters after his junior season is complete. When Weber says he might still add one more player to K-State’s already strong 2020 recruiting class, I think that’s what he’s worried about.
But K-State has already signed one more incoming recruit than it has outgoing seniors, so the Wildcats are likely expecting at least one player to transfer. That could honestly be anyone. College basketball players come and go for all kinds of reasons every season. For now, your guess is as good as mine.
The only change I would make to K-State’s usual starting five is swapping Mike McGuirl for DaJaun Gordon. Neither one of those guards has played all that well for the Wildcats so far. Maybe a switch would get one, or both, of them going.
Not nearly enough, apparently.
K-State is shooting 41.2% from the field and 25.6% from three-point range this season. That’s … not great.
I have never considered the lighting at Bramlage Coliseum to be one of the reasons why, but maybe it’s a factor. Whenever I see the Wildcats practice there it’s usually much brighter than it is during games.
I’m expecting good things from Jeff Mittie’s team. It has beaten the daylights out of Omaha, Illinois-Chicago and Oral Roberts and scored 109 points in its last game.
Things will be considerably more difficult against Big 12 opponents, but Peyton Williams will get better after volleyball season ends and she focuses entirely on basketball.
The Wildcats are a NCAA Tournament team that could finish in the top half of the conference standings.