The Kansas State Wildcats men's basketball team represents Kansas State University in college basketball competition. The program is classified in the NCAA's Division I, and is a member of the Big 12 Conference. The current head coach is Bruce Weber.
The program began competition in 1902, and has a long history of success. The first two major-conference titles captured by the school were won in the sport, in 1917 and 1919 (in the Missouri Valley Intercollegiate Athletic Association). Kansas State has gone on to capture 17 regular season conference crowns in the sport, and the program has winning records against all other Big 12 teams except Kansas and Oklahoma.
Street & Smith ranked K-State 22nd in its 2005 list of the 100 greatest college basketball programs of all time, while Jeff Sagarin listed the program 27th in his all-time rankings in the ESPN College Basketball Encyclopedia. Entering the 2012–2013 season, the Wildcats had a record of 1,552–1,087 (.588).
Read more about Kansas State Wildcats Men's Basketball: History, Sunflower Showdown, NCAA Tournament Appearances, Coaches, Conference Membership History, Record Vs. Big 12 Opponents
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“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.... Now I know we’re not in Kansas.”
—Noel Langley (1898–1981)
“Worn down by the hoofs of millions of half-wild Texas cattle driven along it to the railheads in Kansas, the trail was a bare, brown, dusty strip hundreds of miles long, lined with the bleaching bones of longhorns and cow ponies. Here and there a broken-down chuck wagon or a small mound marking the grave of some cowhand buried by his partners “on the lone prairie” gave evidence to the hardships of the journey.”
—For the State of Kansas, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“He said “Next time can I bring my friend?”
And I thought “Does he mean friend?”
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Which was quite bold in those days.
It was the Dark Ages. Men and men.
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And did, dear.”
—Alan Bennett (b. 1934)
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)