Risk? Kansas State fans love risk. Helmets and seatbelts are
for Jayhawks.
This is a crowd that hits on 17 and always doubles down on 11. Bob Huggins?
Risk. Frank Martin? Risk. Of course they wanted to give Doug Gottlieb a job,
sight unseen.
So when John Currie stepped to the table, flipped over a seven of spades and a six
of hearts and proudly declared his coaching search over, you could hear little
Manhattan let out a collective groan of resignation.
The Little Apple had grown to embrace Alice Cooper, snakes and all. Currie
handed them Pat Boone.
"Give me a chance," Bruce Weber pleaded during his introductory news
conference at Bramlage Coliseum.
Manhattan groaned again.
Weber is a perfectly decent coach, a hell of a nice guy. He wins more games
than he loses. He's clean. Which, come to think of it, is actually part of the
problem. There's nothing sexy or dangerous about him, the way there was with
Huggy Bear and Hurricane Frank.
K-State faithful had grown used to the idea of hanging with the bad boys, of
wearing black, of rallying behind a rebellious figurehead who sneered at
authority. They embraced the Dark Side. Weber is a Jedi coach in a Sith town.
Faced with his most defining hire, Currie ran a play right out of the First
Time Athletic Director Handbook: He went with the safest choice.
"I worked really hard to find somebody to tell me Bruce Weber couldn't get
it done, Bruce Weber couldn't coach," Currie told reporters Saturday.
"To be honest, the further I (looked), the better and better it got."
Clearly, Currie hasn't watched the Big Ten Network lately. Or talked to fans at
Illinois, Weber's last stop. Or even bothered to check his Twitter feed.
There was this beauty Saturday from former K-State great Jacob Pullen, a
Chicago native, who tweeted: "I support kstate for life no matter what but
I'm not a Bruce (Weber) fan and I think Kstate can do a lot better."
Also from Pullen: "(He's) not a good coach I have friends that played for
him who would say the same."
From Jamar Samuels, whose wired money was allegedly the straw that broken
Martin's back: "I (don't know) how I feel about this one."
Freshman forward Thomas Gipson retweeted a comment from a fan who'd wished K-State
assistant (and alum) Brad Underwood had landed the job. Gipson later
apologized.
"The first thing I've got to do is win over the players," Weber said.
"If I win over the players and win, fans will come. That's got to be my
No. 1 priority and I figured that out many years ago."
Wish him luck. For all his strengths — the Wisconsin native's taken eight
teams to the Big Dance over the past 11 seasons — Weber has some serious hills
to climb on the perception front. The major one, of course, is that he took
what Kansas coach Bill Self built in Champaign, Ill., made it to the NCAA title
game with Self's players in 2005, then methodically ran the Illini program into
the ground.
Insiders will tell you Weber is a good man. Fans see a good man who lost 12 of his
last 14 games. They see a good man who went 50-56 in the Big Ten over his last
six seasons. They see a good man who missed the NCAA tourney three times over
the last six years at one of the better programs in the Big Ten, a place with
pipelines that run into Chicago and St. Louis.
Before Saturday, when we last saw Weber, he was broken and beaten. It seemed
his young team had quit on him, shut him out, or both. His Illini were clobbered
at Nebraska. He whimpered through news conferences, and seemed resigned to his
fate, Old Yeller in wing tips, a dead man walking.
"Ohio State's playing (Saturday), and we beat them," Weber noted when
asked what had caused the house of cards to collapse at his feet. "So it
wasn't all wrong."
To be fair, it wasn't. The rap on Weber is that he can't recruit front-line
talent, yet Illinois had a class ranked in Scout.com's Top 30 three different
times between 2008-2011. By comparison, K-State made the top 30 just once over
that same span.
Folks rarely talked about the Illini being as in-your-face nasty as Michigan
State, Wisconsin or Purdue, yet under Weber, Illinois ranked third in the
nation in scoring defense in 2009; 19th in scoring defense in 2008; and fourth
in scoring defense in 2007. K-State, at the same time, checked in at: 140
('09), 172 ('08), and 86 ('07).
No, his teams were never remotely the same after Deron
Williams and Dee Brown left town, but when they're right, they'll badger the
snot out of you. Weber's mantra on the floor isn't all that different from Martin's,
other than the lack of wide-eyed histrionics.
Still: You spend nine years in downstate Illinois trying to escape Self's
shadow. For your next move, you decide to relocate 80 miles down the road from
the guy? And you sign up for five more years of playing him at least twice?
Either Weber was that desperate to hitch his wagon to a BCS train again, or the
man's a closet masochist.
"You better believe I asked that question," Currie said when queried
as to how his new coach would enjoy sharing a state with Self. "And he
nailed it right off the bat."
This is Currie's hire, Currie's vision. Weber is the anti-Martin. He's a known
commodity. He makes a point to watch his language in public and on the
sideline. He doesn't raise red flags with the NCAA. Every time Currie said the
word "integrity" Saturday, you couldn't help but think it was a jab
at Hurricane Frank, who was wildly popular with K-State fans but privately at
odds with his young athletic director. If Weber winds up getting run out of
town, Currie will probably be huffing and puffing right behind him.
In the meantime, nits will be picked. With the cameras running, a clearly
frazzled Weber referred to K-State legend Ernie Barrett as "Ernie
Barnett" and called former Wildcat coach Cotton Fitzsimmons "Cotton
Fitzgerald."
Manhattan groaned again.
"I think you'll find out," Weber chuckled later, "I'm a real
guy."
In the Little Apple, real is new. Different. Huggins stalked the sidelines like
John Wayne in "Rooster Cogburn." Martin wore bow ties and screamed at
the universe. Weber cuts his own lawn, walks his own dog, shops for groceries
and goes to church. This is going to take some getting used to.
You can follow Sean Keeler on Twitter @seankeeler or email him at
seanmkeeler@gmail.com
