Gathering Momentum

Every year for the last generation, my wife and I would cleave a few days from our calendars, pack the purple polos/pullovers and meet up with longtime friends at the Big 12 men’s basketball tournament. We’ve been doing it since the Wooldridge era. Dallas, Oklahoma City, the last several years in Kansas City.  

Not this year.

It was a joint decision, made through like-minded osmosis and group texts, finalized after the Cats were summarily dismantled by Iowa State at Bramlage on February 1, two whole games before Jerome Tang said out loud that maybe there really isn’t any glory in the combat.  

In a community like ours, this goes deeper than football and basketball games. How long before the obvious flaws in Division 1 college sports begin to splash back on the college town? How long before there aren’t enough butts in the seats to sustain an annual collection of 19-year old millionaires who will be here all of six months? 

What does this still-emerging scenario mean for growth? Our community’s leading economic developer said recently on my radio talk show he’s lucky if he gets just a few hours on the ground with private sector execs looking to build or expand and bring jobs. Will that get any easier when their first thought is, “Hey, wait a minute. Aren’t you the guys who lost two coaches in one year? What gives with this town?”

If their first taste is sour, we’ll never even get them to the chipotle raspberry black bean dip at Lucha.

Back in the Pleistocene Era, Jon Wefald called K-State athletics the front door to the university. Our story became about a scrappy little land grant tucked into a place we love full well called the Flint Hills in the middle of the country. Snyder’s miracle turnaround fueled by a family-driven ethos. Now, we’re the one school in the Power Four to lose our two most prominent coaches in the same year.

And what of Savior Tang?

I don’t think Tang’s faith was a schtick, but he was also smart enough to understand how it would land on the hearts of those faithful to our colors. He wore it on his lavender sleeve, no separation of church and the dribble-drive. And now the lawyers are huddled behind closed doors in desperate search of a number somewhere between zero and 18,600,000.

All good things must come to an end. I am actually relieved that my little group is not going to the Big 12 tourney this year. As a longtime season-ticket holding “typical” fan, that should feel blasphemous, yet somehow it doesn’t. We’ll miss connecting with our friends, but not the product on the court or the dynamics that put them there.

Maybe thinking we’re special is just a story we tell ourselves, about how our heritage and geography set us apart. The losing seemed easier to take when you could cloak it in fighting, ever fighting.

In this new uncharted college sports environment, it’s harder than it used to be to go to games. The school seems to be struggling with the change and players’ motivation is fuzzy. Right or wrong, when they don’t win, it gets even harder. A new coach, a whole new “professional” team every year, a revolving door of athletes. This is the new normal. It’s the wild west.

The gathering momentum of all that is wrong seems to be smothering all that used to be right, and the narrative is shifting.

A magic spell shrouded in a purple haze is an illusion.  

Mike Matson’s column appears every other weekend in The Mercury, and he hosts ‘Within Reason,’ Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at 9 a.m. on NewsRadio KMAN.