Kansas State, Texas Tech were equals atop Big 12 last year. Now they’re worlds apart
Bruce Weber remembers a time when Texas Tech was lucky to play in front of 2,000 fans when the Kansas State basketball team made its annual trip to United Supermarkets Arena.
That was at the beginning of his tenure with the Wildcats in 2012, five years and three coaches before Chris Beard arrived and turned the Red Raiders into a national power. Things are different now. That was abundantly clear as a crowd of 14,695 roared throughout Texas Tech’s 69-62 victory over K-State on Wednesday.
Weber waxed poetic about that transformation when the game was over, calling it a “great crowd” and a “great atmosphere” and then praising Beard for getting his team “to play so hard,” so he surely also remembers that Texas Tech and K-State were not long ago equals in the college basketball world.
Last March, the Red Raiders and Wildcats shared the Big 12 championship with 14-4 conference records. They dethroned Kansas together a year after they both reached the Elite Eight and entered the NCAA Tournament as top four seeds. Their futures seemed bright, even though both teams were about to lose key seniors and reload this season.
That was less than one year ago. But it feels like much longer.
Texas Tech and K-State are no longer on level footing. They are now separated by a chasm, and the distance between them seems to be widening. Since the end of the 2018-19 regular season, they have followed very different paths.
In Lubbock, basketball has surpassed football as the most popular sport on campus after the Red Raiders won five games in the NCAA Tournament and fell one basket short of bringing home a national championship last year. This season isn’t going quite that well for the Red Raiders (17-9, 8-5 Big 12), but they are on pace for a top-three league finish, 20-plus victories and a return trip to March Madness behind Davide Moretti and a young supporting cast.
They have been ranked off and on and might return to the national polls if they beat Iowa State on Saturday.
K-State fans would love to switch places.
Weber pointed to Texas Tech as a shining example of what the Wildcats might be capable of in future seasons at the team’s awards banquet last April. Remember, K-State thumped Texas Tech at Bramlage Coliseum last year and claimed the No. 1 seed at the Big 12 Tournament. The Red Raiders had to finish the conference race with nine straight victories to catch the Wildcats.
“It should give everybody a little bit of confidence,” Weber said then, “that if you get the guys buying in and they are coachable, and they understand their roles (anything can happen). That has got to be the same thing for us.”
If they can do it, why can’t we?
Alas, it hasn’t been that simple. K-State lost in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament to UC Irvine and has hit rock bottom without Barry Brown, Kamau Stokes and Dean Wade this year. The Wildcats (9-17, 2-11) have lost six straight games and are in last place of the Big 12 standings. They are on pace for their worst record since the turn of the century. Weber has never lost more than 19 games in a single season.
Frustrations seemed to boil over during a second-half timeout when junior guard Cartier Diarra appeared to mock Weber by exuberantly clapping and shouting some words. Weber reacted by thumping his stool on the floor. Diarra later explained that he was simply showing his coach how committed he was to making plays and Weber had no issue with the exchange, calling it a display of passion.
“All I said was that I’m going to make the next shot,” Diarra wrote on social media. “Coach knows I’m a competitor and I give my all and all he was doing was challenging me and that’s how I responded. I was raised right and I’ve never cursed at Coach (Weber) or any former coach for challenging me. I would love if this negative storyline could go away.”
Innocent or not, video of the incident went viral and overshadowed the game.
Texas Tech had no such distractions to deal with. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why it won the game and continued its march toward sustained relevance.
Or maybe it had more to do with the roster Beard has assembled. The Red Raiders’ leading scorer is freshman Jahmi’us Ramsey, a former blue-chip recruit. Two other young players, Kevin McCullar and Terrence Shannon, have also stepped into big roles.
Beard has found a way to make those pieces fit together into a winning puzzle. Weber has struggled to do the same, even though the Wildcats return key players like Xavier Sneed, Makol Mawien, Mike McGuirl and Diarra from last year’s highly successful team.
None of them are in contention for all-conference honors. Diarra and McGuirl aren’t even regular starters at this point.
Weber didn’t see that coming.
“A year from now you should have three of the best players in the Big 12 if they do what they are supposed to in Xavier, Makol and Cartier,” Weber said last April. “The key for us will be finding those other pieces and guys taking their game to another level.”
If Weber truly set out to follow the Texas Tech model, he failed miserably over the past year.
The Red Raiders provided a reminder on Wednesday.