**Kansas City, Mo. -** Oregon coach Dana Altman, who spent three seasons at Kansas State as an assistant under Lon Kruger and, a few years later, returned to Manhattan to lead the Wildcats’ program for four seasons, has had enough experience with Kansas basketball to last a few lifetimes.
And not all of it was bad. In fact, in his seven seasons with the Wildcats, Altman was a part of six K-State victories over Kansas and had an overall record of 6-13, 2-8 as a head coach.
Altman on Friday recalled the 1988 season, when Mitch Richmond and the Wildcats won two out of three match-ups with the Jayhawks in the regular season and Big Eight tournament, before falling to Kansas in the Elite Eight.
With his third-seeded Ducks slated to take on top-seeded Kansas in that same round at 7:49 p.m. tonight at Sprint Center, Altman will be looking to exact a little revenge.
“If you spend seven years at Kansas State, you don’t like the Jayhawks, all right,” Altman admitted. “Chickenhawks, all right? You can’t spend seven years 90 miles away and the one chance we had to go to the Final Four in ’88 they beat us after we had beat them in the conference tournament. We beat them 2 out of 3 and we had to play ’em a fourth game and they beat us to go to the Final Four.”
While that memory remains painful for the veteran coach, it did nothing to tarnish the respect he has for the tradition-rich Kansas program.
“Kansas State has great tradition,” he said. “But Kansas, obviously, has done awfully, awfully well. Type of tradition we would like to build at Oregon. We’ve got a long ways to go to even be mentioned with those types of programs, but I think someday our program can have that stability and that consistency that some of the traditional programs have and KU definitely has that.”
One of the aspects of KU’s tradition that Altman admires most is the way it has continued no matter who was calling the shots.
“The games against Kansas were always tough,” Altman said. “Coach (Larry) Brown was there and then Roy (Williams) took over for him. It was always a tough atmosphere to go over there, and (we) played them in old Kemper (Arena) a number of times in the (Big Eight) tournament. Kansas tradition has been there for a long, long time. They’ve been good for a long time under a number of coaches.”
So what does he think of the guy who currently occupies the head coach’s office at KU? Well, even though this will be his first encounter with Bill Self as the leader of the Jayhawks, Altman and Self go way back to their Creighton and Tulsa days and even squared off as assistants when Self was at Oklahoma State and Altman was at K-State.
Asked to describe his perception of a Bill Self-coached team, Altman had no problem finding the words.
“Well, they compete,” he said. “They always have. Defensively, they’re always going to be solid. This year is a little different because they’re not quite as big. Traditionally they’ve always run a high-low and tried to jam that thing in and they’re dependent more on their 3-point shooting this year offensively than what they have been. Bill has a way of getting the best out of each team. He’s flexible enough that if the personnel is a little different he can change his style and he has with this team. I mentioned not running as many sets and not looking high-low as much and a lot more perimeter-oriented than some of his other bull clubs have been. But they’re always going to be disciplined, well-schooled and know what they want out of each defensive and offensive possession. You don’t win as many games…. he’s been at great programs. Tulsa was good. Illinois was good, and Kansas. He’s had pretty good jobs, but he’s always made ’em a little bit better.”
