Looking ahead: High stakes ahead for Bruce Weber, Kansas State

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It’s never too early to look at what’s to come. Over the next few weeks, we will give you a peek at what is ahead for teams in the Power 5 conferences and some other teams expected to be players on the national scene. Next up: Kansas State Wildcats.

Kansas’s conference title streak requires no further illumination or qualification. The Jayhawks are long past the point when a college basketball writer might feel obliged to, say, qualify its meaning with context. Explaining why decades of night-in-night-out success is a sample-size accomplishment beyond NCAA tournament glory, or listing the current NBA talent Kansas has faced down since the streak began, or quantifying the overall strength of the league in which the titles were accrued — these bonus plaudits are no longer necessary. The thing itself is enough. Twelve straight conference titles, dude. Twelve! What more can you really say?

How about this: KU won eight of those 12 straight league titles outright. It shared just four. Oh, and this: Kansas split three of the first four in the run (in 2004-05, 2005-06, and 2007-08). Since then, exactly one team has managed to keep pace with the Jayhawks for an entire conference season.

The team? Kansas State. The coach? Bruce Weber.

Bruce Weber’s Wildcats have gone just 32-33 over the last two seasons and have struggled in conference play. Denny Medley/USA TODAY Sports

Short of “Hey, a team just won its 12th straight Big 12 title,” the notion of a Weber-coached Kansas State sharing one of those titles with Kansas is about as crazy as KU streak-fact ephemera can get. And that gap — between Weber’s hugely successful debut and the atmosphere around the program now — reflects not only how much K-State has struggled since but how pivotal the 2016-17 season, Weber’s fifth in Manhattan, Kansas will be.

In March, the same fans who watched Weber share a title with Kansas just three seasons ago spent the better part of March publicly lobbying their school to fire him. The hope? That Weber …

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