I'll do this intermittently over the next few weeks. Play doesn't start until Nov. 14.
KSU
I'm starting with KSU because the coach is making himself such a punch line by having the program fall flat on its face, running off nearly every player who signed an LOI in his first three recruiting classes, and then evoking Winnie the Pooh metaphors.
So, yeah, let's look at the gang in the Hundred Acre Wood--the Kansas State Wildcats. According to Bruce Weber, he has a bunch of Tiggers this year. Well, that's nice, I guess, but I think the faithful in Manhattan would prefer good basketball players to a bunch of happy-go-lucky sorts capering about in a clownish manner.
I have a hard time believing Weber still has a job. In three years Weber has taken K-State from co-champ to first round flame out to middle of the conference and first round flame out to sub .500 and miss the post-season entirely. But that may not be his biggest failing.
Transfer Justin Edwards (a shooting guard who has never hit 30% of his three pointers in a season) returns, but here is the sum total of players left from Weber recruiting classes of 2012, 2013, and 2014:
DJ Johnson--played 14 mpg as a sophomore on a pace to foul out of any game he plays 30 minutes
Wesley Iwundu--expected to shine last year and regressed across the board
Stephen Hurt--6'11" JUCO who blocked a grand total of 7 shots last year in 388 total minutes.
Weber still has just three players out of the 11 who signed LOIs in the last three recruiting classes. I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you. And how many of the early departures left for the NBA? Ha, right.
KSU returns guys who scored a total of 507 points and grabbed 300 rebounds. That's less than 25% of the points for a team that managed only 63 points per game. That's less than 30% of the rebounds for a team that was 7th in rebounding margin in Big 12 play.
So who and what will KSU put on the floor this year? If you're ESPN, you're so confused about it that you name someone as KSU's top rated recruit ("Dante Hales"), but then you list him again ("Dante Williams") as an unrated player with a different last name, different height, and different high school. (For the record, KSU lists him as Dante Williams.)
http://espn.go.com/colleges/basketball/recruiting/school/_/id/2306/class/2015
But to be fair, Dean Wade is probably the top recruit and Carlbe Ervin, Kamau Stokes and Ron Freeman are more likely to have positive effect from day one. Ervin is a JUCO to plug into the backcourt. Brown and Stokes seem under appreciated, and Freeman could be a nice addition, but KSU is going to rely on newcomers for a lot of minutes, and 247sports ranked it as having the 10th best recruiting class in the Big 12.
Yeah, worst recruiting class and most need for the recruits to play right away, and if not right away, then to take over completely in 2016-17. You see Edwards and Hurt are seniors.
To hide the horror that has been the Weber downward trajectory, papers are suggesting Weber was cautious in approaching the 2014-15 season. For instance, this appeared in a Kansas paper recently:
At the start of last season Weber used the term “cautiously optimistic†to describe his team. He sensed impending trouble.
“The whole reason I was doing that was I knew we had some issues,†Weber said. “Yet, our ticket people don’t want me to say this, this and that because they want to sell tickets and they want people excited. I was trying to tactfully use a word that kept a little bit of a damper on things.â€
http://cjonline.com/sports/catzone/2015-10-01/k-state-basketball-ready-fresh-start
Yeah, sure, Brucey old boy, you were so cautious in your optimism last year that you had this to say:
"There's such a tradition at Kansas State. I think we've been able to re-energize it," Weber said. "My biggest goal is to keep it going and take another step. Do we have the talent and athleticism to make a nice run, go deep in the tournament? You bet. I feel deep down like we'll be really good."
http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/2014/09/29/college-basketball-countdown-no-28-kansas-state/16285117/
So it should be obvious that I have become entirely sick of Bruce Weber's act. I think he's completely full of crap. I think he destroyed two major college basketball programs. I still think he's a decent coach in the sense that he can take lesser talented players and get them to play a decent game, but he's terrible at program building, and he's now at the point in his career in which he says anything to try to justify hanging onto a salary he doesn't deserve.
I really don't expect much from KSU this year. Maybe Wade will be McDermott/Hansborough/Bird. Maybe Edwards will become a three point assassin. (He did hit 34% in conference last year.) Maybe Iwundu will take the ball and do something with it himself that is better than being a facilitator to grumpy buttheads like Marcus Foster. But I don't know where KSU will find go to scorers, whether the freshmen can integrate into Weber's motion offense, whether the new guards will be up to the speed of major conference Division One ball, whether DJ Johnson will be healthy and mobile, whether the new big men have any muscle on their frames, whether any of the freshmen will play defense worth a damn, whether KSU can guard the paint, and whether Weber can stop talking about Winnie the Pooh characters.
The preview mags are pretty much unanimous in picking KSU 8th. Had TCU not taken so many roster losses, I might have thought that generous, but it seems about right. On the other hand, the last Big 12 team to kick out the unhappy players and start afresh was the 2013-14 Texas team that surprised everyone. Then again, that 2013-14 Texas team did return Holmes, Ridley, Felix, Holland, Lammert, and Ibeh, so it returned far more than KSU is bringing back this year.
Some of the KSU newcomers:
Ron Freeman
KSU
I'm starting with KSU because the coach is making himself such a punch line by having the program fall flat on its face, running off nearly every player who signed an LOI in his first three recruiting classes, and then evoking Winnie the Pooh metaphors.
So, yeah, let's look at the gang in the Hundred Acre Wood--the Kansas State Wildcats. According to Bruce Weber, he has a bunch of Tiggers this year. Well, that's nice, I guess, but I think the faithful in Manhattan would prefer good basketball players to a bunch of happy-go-lucky sorts capering about in a clownish manner.
I have a hard time believing Weber still has a job. In three years Weber has taken K-State from co-champ to first round flame out to middle of the conference and first round flame out to sub .500 and miss the post-season entirely. But that may not be his biggest failing.
Transfer Justin Edwards (a shooting guard who has never hit 30% of his three pointers in a season) returns, but here is the sum total of players left from Weber recruiting classes of 2012, 2013, and 2014:
DJ Johnson--played 14 mpg as a sophomore on a pace to foul out of any game he plays 30 minutes
Wesley Iwundu--expected to shine last year and regressed across the board
Stephen Hurt--6'11" JUCO who blocked a grand total of 7 shots last year in 388 total minutes.
Weber still has just three players out of the 11 who signed LOIs in the last three recruiting classes. I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you. And how many of the early departures left for the NBA? Ha, right.
KSU returns guys who scored a total of 507 points and grabbed 300 rebounds. That's less than 25% of the points for a team that managed only 63 points per game. That's less than 30% of the rebounds for a team that was 7th in rebounding margin in Big 12 play.
So who and what will KSU put on the floor this year? If you're ESPN, you're so confused about it that you name someone as KSU's top rated recruit ("Dante Hales"), but then you list him again ("Dante Williams") as an unrated player with a different last name, different height, and different high school. (For the record, KSU lists him as Dante Williams.)
http://espn.go.com/colleges/basketball/recruiting/school/_/id/2306/class/2015
But to be fair, Dean Wade is probably the top recruit and Carlbe Ervin, Kamau Stokes and Ron Freeman are more likely to have positive effect from day one. Ervin is a JUCO to plug into the backcourt. Brown and Stokes seem under appreciated, and Freeman could be a nice addition, but KSU is going to rely on newcomers for a lot of minutes, and 247sports ranked it as having the 10th best recruiting class in the Big 12.
Yeah, worst recruiting class and most need for the recruits to play right away, and if not right away, then to take over completely in 2016-17. You see Edwards and Hurt are seniors.
To hide the horror that has been the Weber downward trajectory, papers are suggesting Weber was cautious in approaching the 2014-15 season. For instance, this appeared in a Kansas paper recently:
At the start of last season Weber used the term “cautiously optimistic†to describe his team. He sensed impending trouble.
“The whole reason I was doing that was I knew we had some issues,†Weber said. “Yet, our ticket people don’t want me to say this, this and that because they want to sell tickets and they want people excited. I was trying to tactfully use a word that kept a little bit of a damper on things.â€
http://cjonline.com/sports/catzone/2015-10-01/k-state-basketball-ready-fresh-start
Yeah, sure, Brucey old boy, you were so cautious in your optimism last year that you had this to say:
"There's such a tradition at Kansas State. I think we've been able to re-energize it," Weber said. "My biggest goal is to keep it going and take another step. Do we have the talent and athleticism to make a nice run, go deep in the tournament? You bet. I feel deep down like we'll be really good."
http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/2014/09/29/college-basketball-countdown-no-28-kansas-state/16285117/
So it should be obvious that I have become entirely sick of Bruce Weber's act. I think he's completely full of crap. I think he destroyed two major college basketball programs. I still think he's a decent coach in the sense that he can take lesser talented players and get them to play a decent game, but he's terrible at program building, and he's now at the point in his career in which he says anything to try to justify hanging onto a salary he doesn't deserve.
I really don't expect much from KSU this year. Maybe Wade will be McDermott/Hansborough/Bird. Maybe Edwards will become a three point assassin. (He did hit 34% in conference last year.) Maybe Iwundu will take the ball and do something with it himself that is better than being a facilitator to grumpy buttheads like Marcus Foster. But I don't know where KSU will find go to scorers, whether the freshmen can integrate into Weber's motion offense, whether the new guards will be up to the speed of major conference Division One ball, whether DJ Johnson will be healthy and mobile, whether the new big men have any muscle on their frames, whether any of the freshmen will play defense worth a damn, whether KSU can guard the paint, and whether Weber can stop talking about Winnie the Pooh characters.
The preview mags are pretty much unanimous in picking KSU 8th. Had TCU not taken so many roster losses, I might have thought that generous, but it seems about right. On the other hand, the last Big 12 team to kick out the unhappy players and start afresh was the 2013-14 Texas team that surprised everyone. Then again, that 2013-14 Texas team did return Holmes, Ridley, Felix, Holland, Lammert, and Ibeh, so it returned far more than KSU is bringing back this year.
Some of the KSU newcomers:
Ron Freeman
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