Wichita steps up
A change in conference boosts Wichita State’s hopes for a men’s basketball national title
Inside athletics director Darron Boatright’s office is a basketball autographed by almost every national championshipwinning coach in Division I men’s history. He’s been told it’s one of a kind by the same Hall of Famers who agree to sign it. The names include John Wooden, Mike Krzyzweski, Bob Knight, Dean Smith, Jim Boeheim. The list goes on.
Staring at his prized possession from across the room with a gleam in his eye, Boatright turns and deadpans: “I hope Gregg ’s the next one to sign it.”
National championship expectations are no longer wishful thinking for this once midmajor program. Not that they ever were to the team’s high-profile coach, Gregg Marshall. In many ways, it’s been a reachable goal ever since the Shockers made it to the Final Four in 2013 and nearly went undefeated the following season. Wichita State’s suddenyet-opportune transition to the American Athletic Conference in
2017-18 is indicative of that. Marshall has a 261-90 record in 10 seasons with the Shockers, reaching the NCAA tournament six consecutive seasons out of the Missouri Valley Conference.
“Why can’t we win a (national) championship? Why shouldn’t that be the goal?” says junior forward Markis McDuffie, the team’s leading scorer and rebounder in
2016-17. “We have everyone back. And we’re as hungry as ever.”
A fresh AAC logo on Devlin Court, along with conveniently decorated on “We’re American” banners draped all over campus, are figuratively the finishing touch of a program transformation. Yet it’s also the beginning of an era in which a Sweet 16 finish might be seen as more of a disappointment as opposed to a breakthrough. Marshall expects his team, ranked No. 8 in the preseason USA TODAY Sports Coaches Poll, to be perhaps his best team ever.
So do the players.
Senior guard Conner Frankamp, who is from Wichita and played for a season at Kansas before transferring back home, has watched WSU’s renaissance from afar and now up close.
“When I committed to Kansas in high school, the programs were at different places,” Frankamp says. “Now, I feel like Wichita State is on the rise as a powerhouse program.”
And every powerhouse program needs a powerhouse fan base. Players and coaches admittedly cannot go to a restaurant in town without getting a “What do you think of the American?” question.
“The reception from us joining the American has been through the roof. Everybody — and I mean everybody — has been super hyped,” Marshall says. “I thought there’d be some old heads who had grown up with the Valley and that’s all they knew. I thought we’d have some folks who thought the change is not good. But I haven’t heard one negative comment about the whole deal.”
Marshall says the impact of joining a power conference was evident when he was on the recruiting trail this summer. Yet the reality of what it all means in the immediate future really kicked in when he and Boatright looked over the team’s 2017-18 schedule for the first time. Before facing the likes of Connecticut, Cincinnati and SMU in conference play, the Shockers have a rigorous non-conference schedule that features road contests at Baylor and Oklahoma State, as well as top-notch competition in the Maui Invitational.
“Can we mix in a game against (Bradley)?” Marshall quips of a Missouri Valley team it beat by an average of 25 points in three games last season.
Boatright adds, “You look up and down the schedule and see murderer’s row. Then you realize, this is now called conference play. And we have a non-conference schedule that was based on a Missouri Valley conference slate, to boost our RPI for the committee. So there are no nights off.”
‘NO LIMITS’
Marshall is a fiery coach who once told a five-star recruit his attitude wasn’t good enough to play for him. Boatright, who grew up a Kentucky fan and has a background in basketball coaching at Alabama, is the behind-thescenes orchestrator. He speaks daily with Marshall. It was Boatright and his small administration, under the direction of school President John Bardo, who spent 18 months quietly planning the school’s move to the AAC — or as Boatright jokes, the athletics department’s “secret science project.”
During the conference change process, which finalized in April and started in August for all 13 of Wichita State’s Division I sports teams, Boatright says he kept Marshall up to speed with the progress — although offering vague details.
“We knew that Gregg wanted to be in a different conference,” Boatright says. “He really thought the program would be better served. We knew his personal feelings. But I never wanted to put any of our coaching staff under that stress of what we were doing to get it done.”
Boatright is quick to point out, however, that Wichita State’s continued development is a product of Marshall’s leadership. Whereas most university athletics directors expect — or demand — success from their men’s basketball coach, Boatright says Wichita State follows an inverse model in which the entire department feeds off Marshall.
“I wish I could say it starts with me, but it doesn’t. It starts with him,” Boatright says. “What people don’t understand about Gregg Marshall is that he very much embodies the program. He’s the guy who’s on his knee picking a staple out of the carpet because it looks bad. ... He’s doing that because he expects the next person to do that, too. He holds everyone accountable. It’s not, ‘Look at me, I have to do this because nobody else is.’ It’s just what we do here. Nothing is beneath any of us.”
Boatright scoffs at the idea of Wichita State needing to switch to a power conference to keep Marshall from leaving for a bigger program someday. Marshall, 54, is making a comfortable $3 million in base salary, which made him one of the top-10 highestpaid among last season’s 68 NCAA tournament coaches, and that number soon increases to
$3.5 million a year (stretching to
2021). But his name has been linked to such coaching vacancies at UCLA and Indiana over the years.
“People always say, ‘What keeps coach here?’ So far, it’s been because he’s been allowed to operate and receive whatever he needs to be successful,” Boatright says. “At the end of the day, I think that’s what any coach wants.”
Marshall has developed a welloiled athletic machine in a town with no major sports.
“This is a very aggressive and progressive community, we have a lot of dreamers and successful entrepreneurs,” Boatright says of Wichita, naming off Koch Industries — a company that branches into such areas as energy, refining, manufacturing, trading and investing — and a handful of other companies to make his case.
“We have a lot of financial support to the point where Wichita State does things that people don’t think are possible in Wichita of all places. There’s no limits in Wichita. That’s the mind-set this community was built on. Everyone here wholeheartedly believes that the big time is not a place, but it’s a state of mind. They feel, ‘Why not Wichita?’ Why can’t we do something big here? And Gregg has fed that desire for them with a love affair that this community has with sports and basketball in particular.”
‘DONE HIDING’
Landry Shamet walks into the Shockers locker room sporting an Ace Ventura-like flower shirt. He’s also wearing a boot on his right foot to nurse a stress fracture that will likely keep him sidelined for the time being. (His timetable is uncertain for the beginning of the season, although it’s likely he’ll be on the court in November.) He is eating Chickfil-A for lunch but is more excited about dinner, when he’ll eat salmon and a cherry pie that Marshall’s wife, Lynn, cooks him. It’s a tradition — having players over for a homecooked meal — that Marshall says was cooked up by Lynn.
“Her explanation was that these guys need to see you when you’re not in a basketball setting, as some cyborg yelling,” Marshall says. “They need to see you in a recliner, petting your dog and around your kids. Some of these guys come from far away to play here and we take them in. She said, ‘If you’re gonna say you’re family on the court, you gotta let them know you care about them in their world.’ ”
Shamet and virtually every key player from last season’s 31-5 team return.
“A lot of people in college basketball might be scratching their head,” Shamet says. “I know, if I’m at another school, I’m thinking, ‘Wichita State? Why are they top five? They were a No. 10 seed last year in the (NCAA) tournament and lost in the second round.’ Part of it is nice to get some recognition rather than doubt. Even when Ron and Fred were here — after they went to the Final Four, it was always, ‘OK, it’s a fluke. It won’t happen again.’ Then they go 35-0. There’s continually been this doubt surrounding Wichita State.
“I feel like the biggest difference, with us going to the American, is we’re done hiding now.”
The Shockers’ No. 10 seed in last season’s NCAA tournament, in which they barely drifted off the NCAA tournament bubble despite sporting a 30-4 record on Selection Sunday, has followed a constant theme of on-paper analyses. Citations of RPI and strength of schedule have overshadowed Wichita State’s potential. For instance, Marshall’s team was one of the nation’s best in KenPom’s defensive efficiency. The Shockers also bulldozed the MVC’s co-conference champ (Illinois State) by 41 points.
“My reaction to joining the AAC was like, now we can actually get what we deserve,” senior big man Shaquille Morris says, frustrated with his team’s No. 10 seed in the NCAAs. “At the same time, it made me want to grind even more. In the five years I’ve been here, this is the most I’ve seen people wanting to get better individually — so we can be better as a unit.”
Shamet says the team’s constant chip-on-the-shoulder mentality won’t change because of a bigger conference or higher na- tional expectations — mostly because Marshall’s coaching tenacity is the key ingredient to the team psyche.
“Coach is a perfectionist, whether we are playing the best team in the country or the worst,” Shamet says. “The Valley was super underrated. They had some guys who could flat out coach. The difference in the AAC is now you’re going to have teams well coached and also see freak athletes and 7-footers coming off the bench.
“Last year, though, we could beat a team by 20, and coach would find a five-minute segment where we got outscored to make us run. He doesn’t allow us to get comfortable, which won’t change. That’s why we’re always built so well come March.”
McDuffie, who will miss the first month of the season recuperating from a stress fracture in his foot, likewise thinks the biggest difference in transitioning to the AAC won’t be the program’s identity but rather the exposure for others to see the Shockers’ hard-nosed style of play. All 18 AAC games will be shown on either the ESPN or CBS networks.
“It’s motivating,” McDuffie says.
“We want to play against the best, and now we get to do that on a night-to-night basis, in nationally televised games. A lot more people get to see what Wichita State is all about. They’ll get to see that toughness.”
“Why can’t we win a (national) championship? Why shouldn’t that be the goal? We have everyone back. And we’re as hungry as ever.”
Markis McDuffie, Wichita State’s leading scorer and rebounder last season