Following road win, Gregg Marshall thinks Wichita State basketball has ‘a new ceiling’
Beating South Carolina by 23 on a neutral floor and Oklahoma State by 19 on the road have given the Wichita State men’s basketball team some confidence away from Koch Arena.
The Shockers are starting to gain some national buzz after their 8-1 start and they can add to it with a win in their annual Intrust Bank Arena game, which is 5 p.m. Saturday against Oklahoma (7-1). The game will be broadcast nationally on ESPN2.
“I’m excited for what our guys have shown they can do,” WSU coach Gregg Marshall said. “There’s a new ceiling now and my job is try to get them to play toward that ceiling as often as possible.”
The Oklahoma State game kicked off an important three-week stretch for the Shockers. After spending most of November beating up on overmatched opponents at Koch Arena, the schedule elevates in toughness for WSU.
The Shockers rose to the occasion for a win in Stillwater, but there’s no room for easing up with the Sooners, who beat WSU by 32 last season in Oklahoma City, coming to town and dates against VCU (Dec. 21) and Mississippi (Jan. 4) coming up.
“I know we’re playing tremendous teams and tremendous players and tremendous coaches,” Marshall said. “But it was designed like that. I love it. I think those first five games got us prepared to go down to Cancun and then the experience in Cancun prepared us for what we’re now seeing.”
After suffering the first real adversity of the season — being pushed around in a 75-63 loss to West Virginia for the Cancun Challenge championship — WSU responded by being the aggressors at Oklahoma State and outrebounding the Cowboys by 11, including 14 offensive rebounds.
Oklahoma State coach Mike Boynton sounded much like Marshall did after the West Virginia game.
“They physically man-handled us in a lot of ways, particularly in rebounding the ball,” Boynton said. “They pursued the ball more aggressively than we did. They brought the fight to us and we didn’t necessarily fight back strongly enough and there’s the result. Several times in the game our guys are slapping at the ball and their guys were going and grabbing it with two hands and pursuing the ball with purpose.”
That type of maturation is the kind Marshall wants to see and thinks WSU, which is still one of the 15 youngest teams in the country, has to have to be able to reach that new ceiling they have established early in this season.
“We have said all along that we like our team,” Marshall said. “The players like the team. The coaches like the team. I like the team. The fans seem to like the team. It’s just how tough are they going to be? They were out-toughed by West Virginia. They turned the tables a little bit against Oklahoma State. We won the battle on the boards. We were coming up with the loose balls. We were the more aggressive team. We need more of that.”
This story was originally published December 10, 2019 at 4:11 PM.
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