‘We’ll just do our best’: With depleted roster, K-State faces huge challenge at Texas
Bruce Weber can see a light at the end of the tunnel for the Kansas State men’s basketball team, which has been dealing with a plethora of injuries and COVID-19 issues over the past month.
“Hopefully in the next week or 10 days we get everyone back,” he said, “and we can maybe come together as a team and have a nice push to finish the season.”
Before that can happen, though, the Wildcats have to play at least a few more games with a depleted roster, starting with a road test against No. 4 Texas on Saturday.
The Wildcats were down to the Big 12 minimum six scholarship players and two walk-ons for their last game, a 70-54 loss against Oklahoma State, and they had to postpone a scheduled home game against Iowa State earlier this week because they didn’t have enough healthy personnel.
But Weber, K-State’s basketball coach, is expecting to have as many as eight scholarship players available against the Longhorns.
He said Mike McGuirl, Rudi Williams, Selton Miguel and Davion Bradford are fully healthy.
It sounds like Antonio Gordon, DaJuan Gordon, Seryee Lewis and Carlton Linguard should all be able to play on a limited basis.
Meanwhile, Nijel Pack (COVID-19 protocols), Kaosi Ezeagu, Luke Kasubke and Montavious Murphy (injuries) are not expected to play.
That will make Saturday’s game even more difficult than originally expected.
“We’ll just do our best,” Weber said. “That’s all you can do right now.”
Texas, which is off to a 10-2 start and looks to have its best team of the Shaka Smart era, would have been heavily favored over K-State under normal circumstances. Now, the struggling Wildcats face an ever greater challenge.
Hard as it may be to envision a path to victory, K-State senior guard Mike McGuirl said the Wildcats aren’t focusing on the negatives.
“It’s not as hard as you think, because we are blessed to be in this situation,” McGuirl said. “We are blessed to have played as many games as we have. Right now we are staying postive, loving the game and trying to get better day in, day out. That is what is driving us. We could drop our heads and complain about this, this and this but there is no need when we have so much good going for us in life. We just have to stay postive and fight every game to win.”
It will take more than a good attitude for K-State to upset Texas, though.
The Longhorns own victories against Indiana, North Carolina, Oklahoma State, Kansas and West Virginia. Their only losses came to Villanova and Texas Tech by a combined total of six points.
With Greg Brown, Andrew Jones and Jericho Sims leading the way, the Longhorns are having their best season in a decade.
Weber may have to dig deep into his bag of coaching tricks. He went with a zone defense against Oklahoma State and will likely try that strategy again. He also said the Wildcats will have to slow the pace of the game down as much as possible, and hopefully avoid foul trouble.
That is something they didn’t do against the Cowboys.
“Regardless of how many people we had, we didn’t really play well,” McGuirl said. “We watched the whole game as a team and were able to learn a lot from it, learn what we need to better on offense and defense. There were a lot of takeaways from it.”
K-State players are hoping to build off that against Texas, even though they will be at a roster disadvantage.
“They have had a good attitude and we are trying to stay positive,” Weber said. “Who knows? We are going to go in there tomorrow, grind it out and see what happens.”
This story was originally published January 15, 2021 at 1:53 PM.