1. Kenpom is not designed to compare one year to the next. Each year is in its own vacuum, again I'm not telling you anything you don't know.
2. Let's for a second accept your flawed premise that last year's team was better than this one based on their kenpom rating. The reason why people would like this team more is because that team underachieved where as this one clearly didn't. If you're so hellbent on simply using kenpom to make conclusions on what should be, at least acknowledge that we lost one game all year he had us favored to win, but won several that we weren't supposed to.
Not withstanding any of the previously mentioned, this team won more and has a first team and second team all conference player, duh. I don't know if you still watch K-State games or why you watch them if you do, but 99% of sports fans watch their favorite team to win games and to be entertained.
1. it's not designed to do so, but i think it's a pretty fair use. there's no reason to think the mean quality of college basketball teams is going to dramatically fluctuate from one year to the next. 350 teams is a robust sample size. you might get into problems if you're comparing across widely different eras, like a team from the 60s to a current team. but within the last 17 years i think it's pretty safe.
2a. last year's team didn't underachieve, they actually finished one spot higher in the big 12 than they "should" have. they just didn't overachieve (in terms of conference record) as much as this year's team did.
2b. you seem to have some weird preconception about what you think i'm arguing - i've never argued that this team didn't overachieve, nor have i argued that people shouldn't prefer this team to last year's team.
2c. i think i agree with you that having a couple of third year players that were genuinely among the best in the conference does have an influence. obviously, last year's team had good players too, but it was more a sum of parts effort.
btw, i've watched most of kstate's big 12 games, those that i haven't watched i listened to on the radio. i think i saw a couple of the non-con games, and probably listened to a couple more, but didn't follow closely until conference play started.