I've said it before and I'll both repeat and expand on it here: Currie has done a fanstastic job on the fundraising & facilities side. In those respects he's almost certainly been the most successful AD in KSU history. We get that. We know that the AD's primary functions are to make it rain & to build lasting facilities and that everything else he does should, ideally, be designed to serve those ends. He deserves an enormous amount of credit for the west side stadium upgrade and for the basketball practice facility. It's impossible to overstate the magnitude of those achievements, particularly as viewed in the context of the history of KSU Athletics.
These should have been heady times in the KSU Athletic Department. The most successful rainmaker in the department's history at the helm, a legend defying the odds in the primary revenue sport by recreating success the smart money said could not be duplicated in an improbable second act and a legend in the making behind the LMD of the other primary revenue sport. One of these folks is clearly the best KSU has ever had at his position and the other two arguably are as well, at least by some measures.
Currie holding Jamar out of the Syracuse game is a big deal for KSU in that the perception of that event from the outside looking in is that of an overeager and hyper-anal young AD picking a fight with a coach he disliked at the expense of both the men's basketball program and a senior player looking forward to playing the biggest game of his career. The damning perception in the media seems to have been that Jamar probably didn't do anything wrong, that's an ENORMOUS problem for KSU that Currie has exacerbated by being a weasel and modifying his story post hoc.
But suppose Jamar was clearly in the wrong and he played against Syracuse, what's the REASONABLE worst case outcome? A slap on the wrist & forfeiture of that game and others he might have participated in going forward had KSU won? Big deal. It's very difficult from a fan's perspective to view this as anything other than John Currie protecting John Currie's resume at the expense of Jamar Samuels, the KSU men's basketball program and Kansas State University. That perception, again, is an ENORMOUS problem for KSU and it's one purely of Currie's making.
Given the nature of Currie's recent actions towards the basketball program it's completely unsurprising that he had no real options when Frank walked. The national perception at that point was that our resume polishing AD had just run off the most initially successful coach in the history of KSU basketball in a feud over what seemed to many to be a non-issue. Couple that with Frank's all-American rags-to-riches life story and his present status as something of a media darling and it seems fair to say that Currie created a toxic atmosphere at KSU. Right or wrong that's how KSU looks to America right now and the best the athletic department can do to combat that perception is to spew forth a few weak rumors about a potential disaster had Frank stayed.
High level assistants & top shelf mid-major HCs have many options and needn't troll through the toxic slums of the college basketball world for their next gigs. The risk of being screwed by an out of control AD and destroying one's career before reaching the highest levels is very real; thus, given Currie's recent actions, it's safe to assume that none of these guys were coming. And make no mistake: so long as John Currie occupies the AD's chair KSU will continue to be a toxic slum so far as quality prospective HCs are concerned. For them the status quo is quite good and changing it requires reasonable certainty that they'll improve their situations and will have success and a high probability that their future success won't be sabotaged by their next employer. With Currie at the helm KSU does not offer those things to prospective HCs.
The process was frustrating to watch because I've run precisely the same process, in precisely the same manner on an acquisition a good fraction of the size of a DI hoops coach hire: my critera were put in place post-hoc to justify my desired outcome which was predetermined. Currie is doing the same thing here. He clearly got his guy and he's backfilling, not particularly successfully I might add, in an attempt to make it appear that Weber was the best & inevitible result of a well considered process that quite obviously didn't actually exist.
It strikes me as rather odd that previous experience as a BCS level HC was considered at all given that the last time a coach with those credentials was hired by, and had success at, Kansas State (absent very serious extenuating circumstances) in either major revenue sport Woodrow Wilson was President of the United States and the Roaring 20s were not yet underway. And since no one who had experience as, simultaneously, a basketball, football & baseball HC at one BCS institution and, also simultaneously, a baseball & basketball HC and athletic director at another, prior to their coming to KSU, we can safely dismiss the lateral hire of undamaged goods as an option. It has never happened at KSU.
Bob Huggins represents the only instance in KSU history in either major sport that something that was approximately a lateral hire occurred and resulted in significant success. But there KSU took a chance on someone with serious baggage and was rewarded with an instant revival of a dead program, THAT is the prototype lateral hire who has had success at Kansas State. If Currie needed high major experience the only person in the market who fits what has worked in the past at Kansas State was oscar Pearl. Pearl would have: won, won immediately, set sail in a few years for greener pastures & left the program with a longer sustained legacy of success and better players than those present when he arrived. In doing so he would have continued the positive momentum the program had until last week and, perhaps more importantly, he would have continued to dissolve the old saws that you can't win in & recruit to Manhattan, KS.
While I wasn't entirely on the DG bandwagon he would have brought something to the table that KSU desperately needs, particularly in light of Currie's recent and rather extraordinarily damaging actions: enormous positive media attention. If the top 50 donors to KSU's athletic program gave their entire collective net worth to KSU tomorrow the university, quite literally, could not buy the positive publicity that would have resulted from a DG hire that would have effectively converted ESPN's college hoops coverage into a KSU infomercial for the next few years. This hire would have been the media equivalent of the west side stadium expansion & hoops practice facility multiplied by some factor greater than one. Because he doesn't appear to be a complete idiot he could've taken the returning team to the NCAA tournament with the question marks being whether or not he could run the program & sustain that success thereafter.
It's instructive also to look across the field to Vanier and recognize what it took to bring success to the other major sport. There it took promises of facilities upgrades the department couldn't afford and contractually ceding complete control of the program to a little known but promising assistant to lure in anyone with a pulse. The reward has been vast but the risk was extreme. Again, there has NEVER been a successful lateral hire at KSU, not in footbal and not in basketball; to succeed here requires the calculated assumption of great risk and that's the one thing a resume polishing short timer will never do.
Weber brings a proven track record of mediocrity & underperformance, a history of leaving programs with worse rosters than those he inherits & his hire, judged solely by the reaction of the national media, has already resulted in setting the image of KSU athletics back 10-20 years. Rushing out to compete with CoC & SMU is bad enough, hiring proven mediocrity with little upside is worse and doing so in a manner that brings back from the grave the old mantras about it being impossible to win in and recruit to Manhattan, KS is disasterous. Doing it right after rough ridin' a senior player and a coach who one of the best popular embodiments of the American Dream right up the ass in a very public manner is death, no one worth a damn will come here now.
The outcome is awful for everyone except John Currie. Currie bought himself a couple of years in which to shop for a better gig while preserving his own personal worst case scenario, a lateral move, by virtue of putting a poor performing but known commodity in the driver's seat of one of KSU's major programs so as to not so much win but not lose too badly too quickly. In doing so he made both major sports dead men walking. Enjoy the next couple of years 'Cat fans, they're as good as it's going to get any time soon.
