Let me see if I can tie together some themes in this thread to provide a summary for the administration and athletic department of how the last couple of weeks turned into a PR disaster.
First, the Jamar thing happened. K-State fans find out about it right before the game. CC, you know what a "K-State" occurrence this was. "Welp, here we go again." In the fallout, we see some of the most public evidence of the Frank/Currie rift that we've seen. We hear about the trashcan. Most of the media immediately call BS and speculate that Currie was either lying or digging through the trash himself. However, most immediate K-State fan reaction is to accept the story and focus anger on the snitch or on Currie for not digging deeper before suspension (still buying Currie's story itself, which is more than the media was doing at this point). Currie's transparency mantra has still earned him enough credit at this point for fans to accept this story.
Next, Frank takes the South Carolina job, which no fan was expecting. Currie and Frank talk about how much they loved each other. Unfortunately, that doesn't really fit, and a lot of K-State fans who were trusting Currie were now rethinking that. There are suggestions that things were about to spiral out of control with Frank...and there were fan concerns about some things with Frank, so most fans weren't panicked at this point, thinking Currie could make a hire that would at least not set K-State back. However, paradigms were shifting rapidly, and when paradigms shift, people tend to react emotionally.
The search is underway, and the fans who have felt heavily invested in this basketball program since its resuscitation want to send the message to Currie that they support out-of-the-box, that they want to win, that they recognize that K-State has some unique challenges that requires some risk in order to try to succeed at the highest level. So you get #TeamPearl and #TeamGottlieb. This isn't just the "flavor of the week" (at least for the instigators)...this is a deliberate statement to Currie that "hey, we know we're not getting Brad Stevens or Shaka Smart, so at least take a look at these guys that some fan bases might not want even considered. We're totally open to it and would be supportive of it." "Worst" case scenario, Underwood or Henson get hired...pretty safe, there would be some complaining, but I think most folks on here would have gotten on board.
Then, BOOM, oscar Weber. And he fumbles through the press conference, a couple of days after Gottlieb, who I think few people actually realistically thought could be hired, gets on the radio and does 10X the job selling K-State and demonstrating his familiarity with the school. So the actual hire gets up there and gives a D- (generous) performance to the fringe candidate's A-. People are sitting there thinking: "how is this guy going to sell the school if this is what he puts out there"? It came across 100% as "Oh, man, I just got fired. What am I going to do? What's that? K-State wants to hire me? The Jayhawks? Oh. Where? Manhattan? Sure, I mean, I got nothing else going on. Might as well. Give me a few talking points. Kansas is a pretty good state for recruiting, right?" Poor, poor form.
And then the transcript editing and the sunshine pumping out of the President's Twitter and just an utter lack of acknowledgement of the genuine concern and shock regarding everything that had gone down over 2 weeks.
And even with the shock of everything that went down over that 2 weeks, I still don't think you would have seen nearly the vitriol if it hadn't been for one thing: Currie's transparency mantra. He sold K-Staters on that so hard since he arrived that nearly all of them had bought in. They were on board, and many of them gave him the benefit of the doubt when the media and national folks were laughing and calling "BS." And then he told obvious lies at the press conference about his relationship with Frank, and his folks implied that Frank was about to implode, and the coaching search happened in the dark and went BOOM, and press conferences were edited, and Currie's credibility evaporated along with the transparency. And all those K-Staters that had given him the benefit of the doubt felt they had been played like fools, which is not a good feeling, and tends to make people very, very hurt and very, very angry.
"But," you say, "there are things that cannot be said, because there are laws, and there ways the game is played." I'm sure that's true. But that's not what Currie sold us when he arrived. There were no caveats...there were no asterisks. There was no "we will be transparent until laws get in the way or until things get messy or until we have to play the game." That's not really even that much transparency. What Currie meant was "there will be no secret contracts," but that's not what he said. His biggest misstep all along here may have been the transparency promise.
He was happy to take the benefit of his transparency promise: K-State fans buying in, giving at an unprecedented level, enabling building projects on a scale not seen before at K-State. But now he's seeing the downside of the promise, and he needs to own it, just like he wants to own the building projects and the other benefits of the promise. He couldn't live up to the scope of his promise, and he needs to own that if he wants to get any credibility back with a significant portion of his fanbase.
This isn't about a radio talk show host. This is about promises and lies and not living up to the standards you set for yourself. This is about reaping the benefits of a passionate fanbase and then not being responsive to their concerns and fears when it appears to them that you're using their passion for your personal gain, without regard for the future of a program in which they have heavily invested.
