Kansas State already has 20 wins and the assurance of its highest finish ever in the Big 12 Conference.
What the Wildcats still don’t have, coach Bob Huggins said Thursday, is a guarantee of their first NCAA Tournament bid since 1996.
Beating Oklahoma in Saturday’s regular-season finale in Manhattan would go a long way toward easing Huggins’ mind.
“I’ve been told that nobody from a BCS conference with double-digit conference wins and 20 regular-season wins hasn’t made it in,” Huggins said during a conference call. “I hope that’s the case.”
Kansas State (20-10, 9-6 Big 12) also would finish alone in fourth place with a victory over the Sooners, earning a first-round bye for the conference tournament. But the Wildcats shouldn’t let up if they win Saturday, Huggins said.
“To feel safer, I’d like to win a few more games in the conference tournament,” he said.
No team seeded fifth through 12th has ever won the conference tournament, and some coaches have said it’s unfair to expect a team to win four games in four days. Occasionally, someone will float the idea of trimming the field to the top eight finishers.
Huggins, who is in his first season with the Wildcats, doesn’t see a problem.
“If you finish fifth or lower, you should have to play more games,” he said. “That’s how you reward teams for doing well throughout the year. I wouldn’t trim the tournament to eight.”
Huggins would change one thing, though: The NCAA’s policy of giving an automatic bid only to a conference’s tournament champion.
“I don’t think that for winning the conference tournament, you ought to get the bye,” Huggins said, later explaining that by “bye” he meant “bid.” “I think you ought to get that for winning the regular season, because how you do in 16 conference games is more important. But it is what it is.”
Huggins also said that the Big 12 – which has two teams in the top 10, No. 3 Kansas and No. 7 Texas A&M – is stronger than its critics suggest.
“If you play in this league, I think you find out how good the league is,” he said. “We don’t have really bad teams in this league. Every game is a test for you.
“When you look at Oklahoma State, they’re 20-9 overall but just 6-8 in our league,” Huggins added. “But anybody who would say Oklahoma State is not a talented basketball team doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”
Oklahoma State denied Kansas State’s bid for a 10th conference win on Tuesday, beating the Wildcats, 84-70, in Stillwater, Okla. Mario Boggan, the Cowboys’ leading scorer, head-butted Kansas State’s Cartier Martin late in the game and was suspended for Saturday’s game against Baylor.
Boggan apologized, and Huggins said Thursday that he had talked to Cowboys coach Sean Sutton about the incident.
Martin raised his arm after being head-butted in the cheek but did not make contact.
“He didn’t take a swipe at him,” Huggins said. “What would you do if somebody walked up and head-butted you? You’d raise your arm so you didn’t get hit again.”