Kansas State Basketball: 8 candidates to replace Bruce Weber as head coach
By Joey Loose
After ten seasons at the helm of the basketball program, Bruce Weber has resigned as head coach at Kansas State Basketball. A native of Milwaukee and former player at Wisconsin-Milwaukee, now in the Horizon League, Weber had taken over the Wildcats job back in 2012, his third head coaching position at the D1 level. The move likely marks the end of a successful coaching career for Weber.
After his playing days came to an end, Weber cut his teeth on the staffs of Gene Keady, serving as a graduate assistant at Western Kentucky before following him to Purdue. Weber spent 18 years on the Purdue bench, on Keady’s side for more than two-thirds of his tenure with the Boilermakers. Weber got his first shot to run a program when Southern Illinois hired him in 1998. His Salukis had five solid seasons, winning MVC regular-season titles in his last two years with a pair of NCAA Tournament bids. His 2002 team went to the Sweet Sixteen.
In 2003, Weber accepted the head coaching job at Illinois, leaving his program in the hands of former assistant Matt Painter and taking over an Illini program that Bill Self had left in great shape. The Illini won the first two Big Ten regular-season titles, with that 2005 team standing out as the best Illinois team in program history, marching to the national title game and finishing with a 37-2 record. In his nine seasons with the Illini, Weber led the team to six NCAA Tournaments, but never got past the opening weekend again after 2005.
His time in Champaign came to an end in 2012, but Weber bounced back quickly and was hired by Kansas State just a few weeks later. The next decade would have ups and downs for the Wildcats, but Weber certainly left an impact on this program. They finished atop the Big 12 standings in his first season, and in repeating the feat in 2019 ended Kansas’s long regular-season title streak. His 2018 team went all the way to the Elite Eight as a 9-seed, and he managed to win nearly 56% of his games with the Wildcats.
Unfortunately, success wasn’t consistent, and the Wildcats have really struggled in recent years. In each of the last three seasons, Kansas State finished below .500 and in one of the bottom two spots in the Big 12. Things have been going in the wrong direction since that conference title in 2019, and the time simply ran out for Weber to turn these Wildcats around.
Despite these struggles, this is not some long-term rebuilding project. This is a Big 12 job at a great basketball school in one of the toughest and most competitive conferences in the nation. We’ve seen how programs like Iowa State and TCU can turn things around with the right head coaching hire, and it’s very possible to see Kansas State back in the Big Dance in the coming years if they get this hire right.
We’ll be taking a closer look at eight potential candidates for the job, though of course these aren’t the only eight men that could get a look by the Wildcats. We’ll run through these names in alphabetical order.