In any normal season, these ’Cats are dogs
ATLANTA — In just about any other year, in just about every other NCAA Tournament, America would have gladly adopted the Kansas State Wildcats by now. They would be celebrated for finding themselves at exactly the right time, for forging a deep regional run despite their challenging seed.
They would be toasted for having come all this way, for knocking the big, bad Kentucky Wildcats out of the tournament, for assembling this run in a laboratory like Manhattan, Kan., a town Lou Holtz would have described as “not the end of the world, but you can see it from there,” if he hadn’t already coined that expression to describe the similarly-sophisticated college town of Fayetteville, Ark.
“We’re a heck of a story,” Bruce Weber, the Kansas State coach, said. “A heck of a story!”
Last year, maybe. Next year? Sure, why not?
But in this year, in this South Region, certainly in this Elite Eight game, the Wildcats are nobody’s idea of a darling, nobody’s idea of an underdog. Cinderella? She wears the maroon-and-gold scarves dangling from the necks of the growing army of folks backing the Loyola Chicago Ramblers.
K-State is a feel-good No. 9 seed? Loyola’s an 11.
K-State had to knock off the latest edition of Coach Cal’s Kiddie Kats, sparing the tournament what seemed like an inevitable infusion of bluegrass blue blood? Loyola’s here because the Ramblers have won three games by a total of four points.
It has been 54 years since K-State, once one of the sport’s jewel programs, has been to the Final Four? Sorry, the Ramblers have that trumped, too: It has been 55 years since Loyola last reached the tournament’s final weekend, and all they did was help drag the country’s civil rights movement along with them when they did it.
K-State even has its own elderly mascot: 88-year-old Ernie Barrett, to whom the Wildcats dedicated their victory Thursday because in 1951 Barrett — whose nickname is actually “Mr. K-State” — was injured during the second half of State’s NCAA finals loss to Kentucky, and he had waited 67 years for his revenge. Nice story. But maybe you’ve heard of Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, the Loyola chaplain who has Barrett beat by 10 years and … well, she’s a nun. It’s hard to compete with that.
“We know that right now, every team is trying to make history,” said Kansas State’s Barry Brown, a junior guard who made the biggest basket of the night (and perhaps the biggest in school history) against Kentucky.
“I’ve been talking to my guys about just making history for K-State, worrying about us, and worrying about what we can do to stop each and every opponent, respecting them, and just going out and playing K-State basketball.”
The problem is, every time K-State tries to do something nice for itself it keeps getting in its own way. Somebody somewhere, sometime, was going to be the spoil-sport that ran into the first No. 16 seed to ever take out a No. 1 after 1 seeds had won 135 such games in a row.
It just so happened that K-State was the beneficiary of Virginia’s largesse (Virginia fans have other words for it), and so the Wildcats, against UMBC, were the ones who improved the record of 9 seeds against 16 seeds to 1-0, all-time, with just about as unsightly a 50-43 win as you could ever quite conjure.
So you could say K-State is already quite used to playing the buzz kill.
“What Loyola has done? What UMBC did?” Weber said, shaking his head, smiling. “That’s all a part of what makes college basketball special.”
The truth is, these Wildcats should be every bit as essential to that fabric as anyone else. Weber once took Illinois all the way to the national championship game, but fell out of favor and wasn’t an especially popular hire in Manhattan in 2012. His roster isn’t filled with the four- and five-star recruits chief rival Kansas feasts on.
And, oh yes: They’ve made this run with their best player, Dean Wade, being able to log only eight minutes the whole tournament due to a stress fracture in his foot.
And yet … they may get to wear the white uniform as the higher seed. But there’s little question they’ll also don the black hat. Right team. Wrong year.