A video that might once have been near and dear to the hearts of Kansas State fans found its way into the Kansas men’s basketball players’ group chat in advance of Saturday’s Sunflower Showdown.
The KU coaches sent them a clip of the Bramlage Coliseum crowd storming the court on Jan. 17, 2023, after the Wildcats beat the Jayhawks 83-82. KU had prior to that point won 15 of the last 16 matchups with K-State.
“I told y’all we’ll get you one court storming,” K-State coach Jerome Tang famously said in an address to the crowd after the game, after leading “K-S-U” chants. “From here on out, expect to win.”
It wasn’t an unreasonable expectation for the next couple years, at least in games played in Manhattan. The Wildcats outlasted a worn-down KU team there, again in overtime, by a score of 75-70 the following season — and the fans didn’t storm the court. They then rather soundly took down the Jayhawks 81-73 in 2025.
The video from 2023, though, was all the motivation KU guard Melvin Council Jr. needed.
“Every player’s seen it,” Council told reporters postgame, “and we just had that mindset that that can’t happen again.”
It did not. The Jayhawks led for most of the night but had difficulty fending off the Wildcats for a while, at least until the second half crossed the eight-minute mark, at which point they embarked on a 27-7 run to seal an 86-62 victory and halt K-State’s win streak at Bramlage Coliseum at three games.
“You never want to see anybody celebrate on your court,” Tang said postgame. “It sucks to see them do it, like really, really sucks to see them do it. I haven’t experienced that before, and it is not a good feeling, not at all.”
The most celebratory moment of all for the Jayhawks came in the final seconds, when Council knocked the ball free to set up Tre White for a final dunk with the shot clock turned off — a bit reminiscent of Council’s own late-game dunk against Missouri on Dec. 7, which was fitting given that he mentioned he had also used a past court storming as motivation for that matchup.
Council also did the K-State fans’ “Wabash Cannonball” dance on the court in the final seconds, a fitting turn for a rivalry that in recent years also saw a KSU player mockingly “wave the wheat” to the Jayhawks on their sideline at the end of a Sunflower Showdown football game.
Clearly, the result was meaningful to the Jayhawks despite the fact that they had just three returning scholarship players, including none from the state of Kansas.
“This game is personal for us,” said forward Bryson Tiller, a redshirt freshman.
KU coach Bill Self was asked after the game what it meant to him to end the Wildcats’ three-year streak, and his immediate response was to note that in the 2023 game, he called a timeout mere moments before Jalen Wilson hit a 3-pointer that would have put KU ahead by four points late, costing the Jayhawks the win, “and then the last two years they just whipped our butt.”
“You know, we talked about it a lot,” Self added. “It’s hard for, I think, in-state rivalries to mean as much to the players in today’s world (as) it did in the past. We tried to make sure our guys understood what an important game it was to many people around here.”
If the court-storming clip was part of that effort, it certainly worked: “I just tried to put that in my head throughout the whole game,” Council said.
Self praised his team’s execution down the stretch and noted that if he was a bit more excited than usual at times, it was because of the significance of the matchup.
“This is a big game to me personally because it’s an in-state game,” Self said. “I told our players, I said, ‘Hell, you’re going to be here one year. You leave here and nobody talks about it, at least in your world. I got to live here.'”
One-year Jayhawks like Council and White will have one more shot at the Wildcats, this time in the friendly confines of Allen Fieldhouse, for senior day on March 7. In the meantime, KU (15-5, 5-2) will continue its schedule against BYU in Lawrence on Saturday.
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