K-State basketball can learn 100 lessons from lopsided home loss against No. 2 Baylor
Whenever the oddsmakers come up with a point spread that looks too good to be true, well, it probably is.
Baylor’s 100-69 dismantling of Kansas State on Saturday was yet another reminder that college basketball games are anything but predictable. The Wildcats entered this game on a hot streak that featured a home victory over Milwaukee and a road win against Iowa State, while the Bears hadn’t done much of anything over the past two weeks because of COVID-19 issues on their roster.
Those factors made some think K-State was ready to compete with the nation’s second-ranked team. Few, if any, expected the Wildcats to pull off an upset, but if the Bears came out rusty while playing their first game since Dec. 9 it wasn’t hard to picture a closer outcome than the opening betting line of 21 points.
About that.
“There’s not much you can say,” K-State coach Bruce Weber said. “They just kicked our butt ... They are scary good.”
The Bears looked nothing like a team that hadn’t been practicing and came out red hot, torching the Wildcats for 56 points … in the first half. So much for playing them at the right time. K-State (3-5, 1-1 Big 12) ran into a proverbial buzz saw as Baylor (5-0, 1-0 Big 12) scored at will early and kept its foot on the gas well into the second half.
One stat best summed up Baylor’s dominance. It won easily, despite the Wildcats shooting 48% from the field.
It didn’t really matter what K-State did on Saturday, Baylor was simply better in every facet of the game.
At one point late in the first half, the Bears were shooting 75% from the field and 63% from three-point range. Of course, it’s easy to make shots when your team is forcing turnovers and converting them into easy layups on the other end.
MaCio Teague led the onslaught with 23 points for Baylor, while Davion Mitchell added 20. But it seemed like everyone that Bears coach Scott Drew inserted into the game left with at least a highlight moment or two. Jared Butler had an eye-popping 13 assists.
By the end, Baylor became the first K-State opponent to reach triple digits at Bramlage Coliseum since 1992.
“We’ve definitely tried to take our offense to another level,” Butler said. “There was some criticism about our offense last year on how it was kind of stagnant, so we’ve tried to take it to another level. I credit coach John Jakus and the staff for really harping on ball movement and fluidity in our offense and I think that’s shown a lot this whole year. We’ve got great guys who can all put the ball in the hoop, so that helps a lot.”
Maybe that was just Baylor playing at a high level. Or perhaps it was K-State struggling more than usual on defense.
“It was a mixture of both,” K-State senior Mike McGuirl said. “You can’t just score 100 points and not be hot, but it mostly has to do with us. We didn’t fight them enough and we weren’t physical enough. We just got outplayed by an older team.”
The Bears were so good that Weber only asked one thing from his players when this game was over. He wanted them to learn from the experience.
Baylor looks like a team with Final Four potential. Weber hopes his players can learn to mimic the way the Bears “play together” and “execute” and “accept their roles” as they mature. If they do that, maybe one day they can play at their level.
“This was our fist time going against a team of this caliber, or anything close,” McGuirl said. “They are the best team in the country. We just have to get back in the gym and listen to the coaches.”
“It definitely humbled us a lot, getting to play against a team that was arguably the No. 1 team in the country,” K-State forward Antonio Gordon said. “We have a lot to improve on, but it shows us where we can be and what we need to do in order to compete. It was definitely a learning experience.”
The Wildcats will try to put everything they learned from this experience into their next game against Jacksonville on Monday.
Gordon actually did all he could to make this a competitive game. The sophomore scored a career-high 23 points on a perfect 9 of 9 shooting while also grabbing six rebounds. But most of that production came in the second half, after the game had already been decided.
Selton Miguel also had some good moments and finished with 14 points, but the rest of the squad struggled to keep up with Baylor’s high-octane offense.
This has been Weber’s worst defensive team during his nine-year tenure at K-State, and it couldn’t do anything to stop Baylor. The Bears averaged an absurd 1.47 points per possession.
“They scored 100,” Weber said. “Normally in a Big 12 game if you score 69 that gives you a chance.”
This result was also another reminder of just how far the Wildcats have to go before they are once again contenders in the Big 12. Baylor was the preseason favorite to win the conference with the bulk of its talented roster returning from a team that won 26 games last season. K-State was picked to finish last in the preseason poll with nine new scholarship players.
When they met on Saturday, it was as big a mismatch as the oddsmakers predicted.
This story was originally published December 19, 2020 at 5:09 PM.