Ex-Jayhawk Manning faces K-State with Wake Forest

DAYTON, Ohio — Whenever John Collins mentions that he plays for Wake Forest, he usually gets a question about his famous coach. Everybody wants to know about Danny and The Miracles .

Danny Manning led Kansas to the 1988 national title, knocking off Kansas State along the way. He’s got Wake Forest (19-13) back in the NCAA Tournament for the first time in seven years, facing K-State again.

“It’s always brought up when I talk to anybody,” Collins said on Monday. “People find out I play for coach Manning, and that’s the first thing that pops up.”

It’s a hot topic again as Manning’s current team gets ready to play Kansas State (20-13) in the First Four tonight. The winner will play Cincinnati in Sacramento.

“We had a lot of fun when I was at Kansas, and we’re looking forward to hopefully having a long run in this tournament,” said Manning, in his third season as the Demon Deacons’ coach.

Manning is 30-5 against K-State as a player and coach. Kansas State’s Bruce Weber was an assistant at Purdue when Manning led Kansas to the national title. The Boilermakers were hoping to face Manning in the tournament that year but got knocked out before they could get the chance.

“When you have success as a player, some of those guys don’t have the patience to be a coach,” Weber said. “They don’t have the commitment. Obviously he does. And I think he’s great for the game.”

Manning has talked to his young team about his experiences in the NCAA Tournament. His players joke that it was so long ago that they can’t find any tape of their coach’s glory moments. Manning doesn’t have anything on tape, either.

“My mom might, but I don’t,”

he said.

Mount St. Mary’s (19-15) and New Orleans (20-11) open the tournament tonight, with the winner facing No. 1 Villanova on Thursday in Buffalo.

LONG TIME COMING: New Orleans is making its first NCAA Tournament appearance since 1996, a span that includes overcoming a hurricane’s destruction.

“It’s for everybody in New Orleans who has been in New Orleans since the devastation of Katrina,” guard Christavious Gill said. “Even the people that left, it’s for them, too.”

COMEBACK KIDS: Wake Forest overcame deficits of 19, 14 and 13 points to win its last three games in the regular season. The only other Division I team to win three straight games while overcoming double-digit deficits this season is Kentucky. And the term “kids” applies: eight of its 13 scholarship players are underclassmen.

WINTHROP: Pat Kelsey is glad his Winthrop players finally have an NCAA Tournament moment to celebrate. Many feel the same way for Kelsey, the Eagles young coach whose time in the spotlight up until now has been filled with heart-wrenching experiences.

Kelsey was a rising assistant at Wake Forest a decade ago who watched his mentor, Skip Prosser, be carried out of his office by paramedics after a fatal heart attack in 2007. It was a loss so devastating that Kelsey gave up the game for nearly a year to make sense of it.

Now the 41-year-old Kelsey is standing in the tournament spotlight for the first time as a head coach.

“You can see how much this means to him,” senior forward Roderick Perkins said.

The 13th-seeded Eagles (26-6) will take on No. 4 seed Butler (238) in a South Regional first round matchup on Thursday.

“He had a very special relationship with my father,” said Winthrop assistant Mark Prosser. “This is going to be very special. It’ll be fun.”

Kelsey wants the spotlight on his players, who came up short in three straight Big South title games before cutting down the nets on their 10th overall NCAA appearance and first since 2010.

“It’s not about me,” he said. “It’s about us. It’s about this program.”

WINTER STORM: Teams chasing a college basketball title are contending with an unexpected wrinkle that’s making last-minute travel plans difficult — a fierce storm bearing down on the Northeast that’s expected to dump up to two feet of snow in some places and create blizzardlike conditions.

Villanova, the top overall seed in the men’s NCAA Tournament, left Philadelphia on Monday afternoon for Buffalo, New York, to get ahead of a storm that’s projected to last three days.