Freeloaders...
How Jerome Tang and Kansas State basketball have made believers of us all
By CJ Moore
Jan 31, 2023
MANHATTAN, Kan. — It’s midway through Kansas State’s practice on Friday morning, and it’s been sloppy. The Wildcats are 25 minutes behind schedule, because they keep messing up the little details that will be key to beating Florida on Saturday. They’ve been late on double teams. The man on the ball keeps getting the angle of his feet wrong. The help-the-helper isn’t getting positioned in the right spot. Finally, coach Jerome Tang has seen enough and calls his team together.
“Don’t confuse boring with a lack of importance,” he says.
The message smacks fifth-year senior point guard Markquis Nowell right in the face. “That’s the human nature,” he says to himself. He walks over to assistant coach Jareem Dowling.
“I love this dude,” he says. “I wish I could play for him for five years. How does he come up with that?”
Since Tang took the job 10 months ago, it sure seems as if he has done no wrong and always comes up with the right thing to say. The Wildcats, ranked seventh in the AP Top 25, are the best story in men’s college basketball. They were picked to finish last in the Big 12 but began this week in a three-way tie for first.
Tang is a rock star. His charisma is on all the time. It’s hard not to like a guy who, after beating his school’s rival, in the midst of a court storm and with the students chanting “F— KU,” climbs up on a table, starts leading a “K-S-U” chant and then finds the perfect thing to say to actually get those young folks to consider a change in attitude.
“It is amazing what you can accomplish when you do it out of the motive of love and joy and passion,” he told the students after beating Kansas in overtime Jan. 17. “I told y’all you get one court storm. From here on out, expect to win.”
Coach Jerome Tang after K-State's OT win over Kansas: 'From here on out, expect to win'
They may just obey considering what is happening in Manhattan. No one saw this coming. When Tang showed up and said he wanted to “elevate the standard,” simply being competitive in the Big 12 would have accomplished as much.
“I wasn’t telling Coach Tang this,” Dowling says, “but I was hoping to get to the NIT.”
Even Tang admits this wasn’t what he imagined. The former longtime Baylor assistant had his expectations. He thought he had an NCAA Tournament team. But the top 10? It took five years at Baylor to even get ranked.
Of course, Tang and Baylor coach Scott Drew didn’t have the luxury of starting that program with a player like Nowell. Visit Manhattan, and it quickly becomes clear there are two men steering this ship. In the 5-foot-8 point guard, Tang found his vessel.
Nowell was as big a part of recruiting the team as any of the coaches. Back in the spring, he was one of two players on the roster. He helped host seven players the Wildcats eventually signed, including his co-star Keyontae Johnson.
Johnson, the former Florida star who sat out for nearly two years after collapsing on the floor minutes into a game at Florida State on Dec. 12, 2020, was looking for someone who believed he could be the All-SEC caliber player he’d been in Gainesville. On his visit to K-State, he had deep talks with Nowell about their goals and aspirations. Johnson felt like he had doubters because of how long he’d been out with his heart issue. Nowell was always counted out because of his height.
Nowell made Johnson a believer that they could do something special together. His incredible self-belief is magnetic. “When I say confidence level is through the roof; it’s over the roof,” assistant coach Rodney Perry says. “He believes he can do anything.”
Tang’s whole thing is always focusing on the short term. Win every day. But Nowell started to see the big picture before anyone else. Back in November during a run to the championship at the Cayman Islands Classic, he started breaking huddles with “Best team in the country!” and then would tell his teammates, “Let’s go play like it.”
“I remember thinking to myself, ‘ehhh, we’re not the best team in the country,'” Tang says, “but I liked him saying it.”
Two weeks ago when Kansas State was on the verge of upsetting the Jayhawks, Tang found himself delivering a similar message: We’re the best team in the country. Let’s go get this thing.
“We’re not the most talented team in the country,” he says, “but on any night, we could beat anybody in America.”
As soon as Kansas State got ranked for the first time this season, it found itself on the wrong side of an 11-0 run in the first half against Oklahoma State a day later. The ESPN camera panned to the K-State bench, and a demonstrative Tang was delivering a plea to his assistants.
What was he saying?
“We didn’t have smiles on our faces,” Perry says. “We didn’t look like we were having fun, because he’s all about making sure that you have fun too. He was talking to us about how we looked. He said, ‘I’m the first one. I’m guilty of it too, but I’m going to change it right now and I want you guys to change it too.’
“We weren’t playing very well, and he was right. We all had a look like, what are we doing?”
The hard part is getting there, but the hardest part might be staying. The Wildcats proved in early January that they were capable of beating anybody by storming through the state of Texas. In a four-day span, they had the eye-opener of all eye-openers in a 116-103 win at No. 6 Texas and then followed that up with an emotional 97-95 win at No. 19 Baylor.
In the days that followed, Tang found himself trying to mentally navigate what sudden success brings.
“We’ve achieved more than anybody thinks. You relax, right?” he says. “Or do you go the other extreme, and say, ‘Man, we can win this whole thing?’ And then you tense up and get tight. It’s like winning is no longer a celebration; it’s a relief. I’m trying to enjoy it, expect to win and try not to be afraid to lose. And sometimes I live in the ‘afraid to lose’ too much.”
Tang is a newbie to sitting in the head chair, but he’s already lived going from the bottom to the top at Baylor. The greatest lesson he learned in Waco is making sure everyone feels involved and success is shared.
When the Wildcats broke into the top 25 on Jan. 9, Tang came in the next day and told his team to give themselves two claps for getting ranked. He printed the polls on card stock and gave a copy to every staffer and then did the same a week later when they made it into the top 10.
Tang also sent a bouquet of flowers to the coaches’ wives with this note: “Thank you for allowing us to do what we do. We couldn’t have the success we’ve had without you. Congratulations on the #11 ranking!”
“He’s so inclusive, man,” Dowling says. “It’s hard not to want to help and not push the thing forward. He loves you so much that when you’re not around him, and you’re not doing the right thing, you feel like you’re cheating him. Because he don’t cheat you. He’s transparent. He loves you. You never have to guess what he’s thinking. You know what he’s thinking, because he’s telling it to you.”
Dowling wanted to harness that power, so he came up with an idea. In the preseason, he set up weekly individual meetings for each player with Tang in his office. (In-season, they meet every other week.) Tang took the opportunity to get to know them. He didn’t want it to be about basketball. He brought a notebook to every meeting. He wanted to know their backgrounds. He wanted to know about their families. He’d ask what he could pray for them about. Those meetings broke down a barrier that usually exists between player and coach. If someone has something on their mind, they’re encouraged to come talk to him.
The payoff is what’s happened with senior Ismael Massoud. Massoud, the only other holdover from the previous regime, was a fringe rotation player before Christmas. He had four DNPs, and Tang had his reasons. In the preseason during conditioning week — which they call Shark Week — the players had to collectively make time in 30 suicide sprints. As they neared the end, the Wildcats had four players dive across the line trying to make it. Massoud was one of the players a split second late, but he didn’t dive.
“I remember thinking, ‘That dude will never play for me,’” Tang says.
When Massoud returned from Christmas break, he told Tang that he felt like he wasn’t being given any leeway. If he had three or four good days in a row, as soon as he showed a glimpse of being soft, it knocked him all the way back down. Tang acknowledge that Massoud had a point.
“I have to be willing to listen to them,” he says.
Massoud played 21 minutes in the next game, an 82-76 win against then-No. 24 West Virginia, which was KSU’s first win over a ranked opponent. In Big 12 play, he’s been a regular in the rotation and is making a league-best 57.1 percent of his 3-pointers.
“After going home, a lot of people would have just blamed the coach,” Massoud says. “It would have been easy to think he doesn’t want to play me and stuff like that. I had to look in the mirror and tell myself that I have to give him a reason that he can’t not play me.”
Massoud rewarded his coach’s faith by diving on a loose ball with three seconds left to secure the win against Kansas.
“That wasn’t about him,” Tang says. “That was about him caring about his teammates. During Shark Week, that was him caring about himself. And so that kind of growth, that’s got to carry some weight, right? That’s got to mean something to me as a coach.”
That night, Nowell and Massoud sat in their apartment together and marveled at how far they’d come.
“We really just beat Kansas,” Nowell said, like he needed to hear himself say it out loud to really make sure it was true.
“It’s surreal to see where we started and where we’ve come,” Massoud says. “It was just us two. Now we’re playing for seeding. It’s not even to make the tournament; it’s playing for seeding.”
Last week as the Kansas State coaches reviewed the film, they noticed that Nae’Qwan Tomlin was not playing as hard as he usually does. Tomlin is so new to basketball that his inexperience is kind of like a badge of honor. On Friday night, Tang introduced his players to alumni back in town during a ceremony in the lobby of the basketball office, and he told his players to share one fun fact about themselves. “A fun fact about me,” Tomlin told the crowd, “I’ve been playing basketball for 4 1/2 years.”
Tomlin is the wildcard on this team. When he’s good, he can take the Wildcats to a magic level. There are few players in basketball — not just college — who can move as quickly as he can at his size (6-foot-10, 210 pounds). How to get the best out of Tomlin is a continual journey, because he’s improving so fast that who knows what he’ll be capable of in a year or even next week. But on the tape against Iowa State, it’s clear he’s holding back. So as the coaches reviewed the film with Tomlin, they showed the spots when he wasn’t running as hard as he usually does and asked why.
Tomlin pointed out he wasn’t touching the ball, and he was right. For the first nine minutes, 30 seconds, he didn’t get one touch.
“That’s our bad,” Tang says.
Tang is constantly seeking tiny details that bring the best out of every player. He tells the story of former Baylor star Perry Jones. The Baylor coaches used to run a lob play for Jones early in every game, thinking that would get him going. But one day they started studying the numbers and realized that when Jones made a 3 he averaged 21 points per game, and if he didn’t make a 3, his average dropped to 11. Through studying Tomlin’s film, Tang figured out early on that he shot a better percentage based on the angle he’d come off a screen. He’s also found that Tomlin is better when he simply gets his number called early.
“He just wants to touch it and dribble,” Tang says.
Every game, Tang and Perry script a plan and pick out a group of plays that they think will work against that opponent. They operate like a football team in this way. They have 230 sets in the playbook, but for the Florida game, for instance, they pulled out 25 plays that would work best against the Gators.
Fifth-year point guard Markquis Nowell makes the Wildcats go. (Chris Jones / USA Today)
In the days ahead of the game, they rep those plays, and on Friday after practice, Perry quizzes Nowell on where he goes with the ball in each set, then reminds him how important it is to get everyone involved.
Nowell, who has the second-best assist rate in the country, looks back at him like, you serious?
Perry gets out his cell phone and points to it. Nowell knows exactly what he’s referencing. Perry is one of the co-founders of MOKAN Elite, the Nike-sponsored grassroots program in Kansas City that has won three Peach Jams and has a long list of pros that includes Trae Young. On the couch in Perry’s office sits a pillow with a picture of all the pros he’s coached on it. When Perry joined K-State’s staff on Aug. 1, Nowell became a regular visitor — “I gravitated to him because he’s like a basketball genius,” he says — and nine days in before leaving for break, Nowell fired off a text message:
“Hey Coach. I want to be the best. I want you to push me to be a pro just like you did your other pros.”
Every day they watch at least 30 minutes of film together, and Perry is constantly reminding Nowell the importance of the point guard position and the standard to which he wanted to be held.
“Now if something’s changed,” he says, pointing to his phone on Friday afternoon, “you need to let me know.”
The next day Kansas State has the keys to beat Florida, but it also has a list of items that need to be addressed to set it back on the right path. For the team, that’s rebounding and defense. For Nowell, that’s making everyone feel involved.
On the first two plays of the day, Nowell finds Tomlin, who runs hard all day.
Everything else seems to play out exactly as the coaches envisioned. For two days they preached bringing a double team when the ball was in the air on the way to Florida star big man Colin Castleton. On Friday, the double was late almost every time against the scout team. By Saturday morning’s shootaround, the Wildcats had it down. In the game, Castleton is flustered early by the double teams and it takes more than 13 minutes for him to get his first bucket. The other key to stopping the big fella is a third defender getting in front of the basket with his butt to the baseline, ready to deal with cutters. On Friday, that help defender kept turning the wrong way. On Saturday, the Wildcats execute this almost perfectly. Castleton finishes with 13 points but did not score on a post-up.
Defense is probably the biggest concern going into the Florida game, considering K-State has had the eighth-best defense in conference play and had allowed Iowa State to reach 80 points for only the second time in Big 12 games. At halftime, Florida has scored only 16 points, and the first thing Tang writes on the board is “7 kills,” meaning K-State had three stops in a row seven different times.
“Defense was on point,” he says.
Rebounding is the other key. “Hit and go get it,” Tang demanded during his pregame speech. Out of the 44 rebounds up for grabs when Florida misses a shot, Kansas State grabs 38. The Wildcats also have 11 offensive boards. Both accomplishments are met with two claps afterward.
Nowell is the star of the day. The plan was to pick on Florida’s drop coverage ball-screen defense, and he navigates it beautifully. He nearly racks up the first triple-double in program history, finishing with 13 points, nine rebounds and eight assists in a 64-50 win.
It’s not all that surprising anymore considering the ridiculous lines Nowell has put up, which included a historic four-game run earlier this month.
Nowell lost his North Star shortly after that. Since it felt like every shot was going in, he started throwing up a few heat checks, like at Iowa State when he stole the ball and pulled up for 3 instead of going in for a layup. That type of shot and the logo 3s are what Tang calls vitamins: You get one a game.
“His stubbornness makes him great,” Tang says. “There’s certain things you say, dang, don’t do that. But he has this great faith and belief in himself that he’ll do it again and be successful at it. And so as a coach, you hate kids to do everything you tell them to do and kids to do nothing you tell them to do, right? Sometimes they gotta do their thing. And he’s learning how to balance that, and we as a staff are learning how to coach it.”
Nowell is in awe of the man who has made him grow in ways he never imagined and made him completely change how he sees the game and leadership. In New York City, where Nowell grew up, it was all about being the loudest guy in the room. You barked orders. You showed you meant business. “To see that you can also be a leader by motivating and loving and caring for one another has changed my perspective,” Nowell says. “We want to win bad for him, because he’s a really good person.”
On Saturday night after congratulating his team on another win, Tang goes around the locker room and hugs every player. He starts with Nowell, holding on extra long and delivering a message.
Next up is the rematch with Kansas, Tuesday night at Allen Fieldhouse.
“I love you, man,” he whispers into his point guard’s ear. “Let’s go make history.”
