History
Through the years the team has participated in 26 NCAA basketball tournaments, most recently in 2012. The team's all-time record in the NCAA tournament is 33–30 (.524). Kansas State's best finish at the tournament came in 1951, when it lost to Kentucky in the national championship game. The school has reached the Final Four 4 times, the Elite Eight 12 times, and the Sweet Sixteen 16 times. Included among K-State's tournament wins are some all-time classics, including an 83-80 win over Oscar Robertson's Cincinnati team in 1958, which Sports Illustrated called "the most exciting game of the 1958 season," and a 50-48 win over second-ranked Oregon State in 1981, which USA Today listed as one of the greatest games in NCAA tournament history.
The best season in the school's history may have been 1959, when the team finished the season ranked Number 1 in the Associated Press Poll. K-State has finished ranked in the Top 10 of the poll on seven other occasions (most recently in 2010), and in the final top 25 fourteen total times. The team has also posted a winning record at home every year since 1946.
After a lengthy period with little success during the 1990s and 2000s, the team has recently returned to prominence. Following a twelve-year absence, the team returned to the NCAA tournament after the 2007–08 season, under first-year head coach Frank Martin. Following that season, Kansas State freshman Michael Beasley was named an All-American and Big 12 Conference Player of the Year. In the 2009–10 season, the team spent much of the year ranked in the Top 10 of the AP Poll and finished second in the Big 12 with an 11-5 record. The team received a #2 seed in the 2010 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament, and beat North Texas and BYU to advance to the Sweet Sixteen, where the Wildcats faced Xavier. The game was a double-overtime thriller won by Kansas State 101-96, which CBSSports.com called "one of the best games in the history of the Sweet 16." Kansas State lost in the next round to Butler, the eventual national runner-up. K-State has now posted at least one win in the NCAA tournament for three consecutive years, through the 2011-2012 season.
On March 31, 2012, Bruce Weber was announced as head coach after Frank Martin left for South Carolina.
Kansas State has a total of 36 All-Americans, 17 regular-season conference championships and nine conference tournament championships.
Read more about this topic: Kansas State Wildcats Men's Basketball
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“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“There is a history in all men’s lives,
Figuring the natures of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“It’s not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)