Mike McGuirl explains how K-State can regain winning culture with ‘a whole new team’
At the end of his sophomore season, Mike McGuirl was one of 14 different Kansas State basketball players that received a ring for winning a share of the 2019 Big 12 championship.
Little more than a year later, he is the only member of that group that remains with the Wildcats.
McGuirl will enter his final season of college basketball as the lone senior on K-State’s basketball roster and recognize only a few familiar faces staring back at him inside the locker room. He has watched seven former teammates transfer and six former teammates graduate during the past 14 months, leaving him with a brand new team.
“This isn’t something that I could have seen coming,” McGuirl said Tuesday during a video conference with reporters. “But it is what it is. I am happy to be here. Everybody had to make their own personal decisions with their lives. I am just happy that I get one more year to be a Wildcat. I am going to go out the right way, that’s for sure.”
McGuirl has followed an unusual college basketball path during his time in Manhattan. The senior guard, who is from Ellington, Conn., was a key reserve that helped the Wildcats reach the Elite Eight when he was a freshman. Then, he played an even larger role as a sophomore when K-State won 25 games and hoisted a conference championship banner. But the good times stopped last year.
Instead of building on those past successes, K-State suffered through one of its worst basketball seasons in recent memory, as the Wildcats won just 11 games and finished last in the Big 12 standings.
That led to a mass exodus of players as the offseason began, leaving the Wildcats with four returning contributors — sophomores DaJaun Gordon, Montavious Murphy and Antonio Gordon, plus McGuirl.
That makes McGuirl K-State’s top returning scorer, as he averaged 6.9 points last season.
Calling the 2020-21 season an adventure might be an understatement.
K-State’s players are all spread out across the country in quarantine because of the coronavirus pandemic. Bruce Weber may need some time to get his new roster up to speed after players are allowed to return to practice.
But McGuirl thinks the Wildcats have already gotten the ball rolling in that department, as all of K-State’s players talk or text every single day.
“No pressure at all,” McGuirl said. “There is just a lot of motivation and a lot to prove. I’m not too worried about having a whole new team and people leaving. People have to do what they have to do. I am really happy with what we’ve got. I couldn’t be more happy, more excited. I think we are all going to get along real well. I will be the only senior, I will be a leader. But we have a lot of young guys who are going to step up.”
DaJuan Gordon is one of them.
He showed promise as a freshman and Weber has singled him out as a future team leader. Gordon helped Weber recruit several of K-State’s incoming players, including fellow Chicago native Seryee Lewis. He thinks the Wildcats will be able to hit the ground running whenever practice resumes.
Gordon learned a lot from his first year on campus.
“I don’t think we want to put it in the past,” he said of last season. “It wasn’t our best year, but if we put it in the past we will forget about it. When the hard times come, we need to think of that and let that motivate us. We need to keep pushing and not have another losing season.”
So what went wrong last year?
“There’s so much I could get into, honestly” McGuirl said. “More than anything, we lost our winning culture. This year we are going to get it back. We have the right people in place. I am very confident.”
Much will be expected from McGuirl if the Wildcats are to bounce back next season. K-State needs to replace a lot of scoring, and he is the team’s top returning statistical shooter and the team’s only senior.
He knows the process has already begun.
“We definitely could use this time right now to jell, because we are 100% a new team,” McGuirl said. “But a lot of other teams are going to deal with the same issue, even teams that have returners. It is my job as a senior to motivate us so that we are doing things other teams aren’t doing ... It starts right now, and we will be good when the time comes.”