When the Kansas State basketball team announced it would play West Virginia this season, many circled Thursday’s game at Intrust Bank Arena as the most-appealing nonconference game on the schedule.
Frank Martin vs. his mentor. Former coach Bob Huggins returning to Kansas to face the team he left after one season. The Wildcats in Wichita.
It was, and is, a very intriguing game. With West Virginia set to join the Big 12, it could be the start of an exciting rivalry.
Funny thing is, when Martin and Huggins began talking about playing each other they envisioned something totally different.
“It started out we were going to play in Kansas City,” Huggins told me today by phone. “We had an idea to do what some other people just started to do a couple years ago, which is Frank, Andy Kennedy (Mississippi coach) myself and somebody else go to a neutral site and play double headers, then go someplace else the next season and play a different team. You know, make it a three-year cycle. We just never really got that off the ground.”
But Martin and Huggins continued to talk and decided to play against each other in Wichita.
They are scheduled to meet again in Charleston, W. Va. next season. If West Virginia is allowed to join the Big 12 next season as a full member, the Wildcats and Mountaineers will also meet two times as conference opponents. That has led some to believe K-State and West Virginia will work to remove their neutral-court meeting from the schedule.
That is still a possibility. K-State sources have indicated that they would prefer not to play West Virginia three times in the regular season. But Huggins thinks the nonconference game will happen.
“We might as well just play,” Huggins said. “We might as well do that, play each other in the conference tournament and again in the NCAA Tournament. No one has ever played five times. Let’s set the record. That would be a good deal, wouldn’t it?”