K-State continued

So the Wildcats were coming off of a great winning streak and were starting Big 12 play. The Cats had a very big conference season opener against the then-#6 Oklahoma State Cowboys. The Cowboys had an excellent non-conference season and we had just finished beating Gonzaga. It was a great game from beginning to end, but the Wildcats came out with a victory. That game, along with the rest of the win streak, boosted K-State into the top 25 with a #25 ranking in the AP poll. The Cats then went off to TCU to take on the struggling Horned Frogs and they came home as victors. The Wildcats were on an exemplary win streak when they head over to Lawrence to take on the Jayhawks- a team that had not been doing very well. I thought that the Cats had a good shot at winning this game. My reasons were that K-State had been on a good hot-streak that looked like it was going to continue for a long time and KU had been having a hard time against good opponents during their non-conference performance. The game was not even close, and we walked out with our tails between our legs. We needed to bounce back, but the problem was that we had to host the then #25 OU Sooners. The Cats survived the game against the high-flying Sooners by stuffing their high-scoring offense- and adding some scoring of our own. The Wildcats then took on the West Virginia Mountaineers. The game was kind of an onslaught; since the Cats stunted WVU in the areas of field goal percentage(54.9 to 32.7) and three pointers made (9 to 4).

The season was progressing nicely; until we headed over to Austin to face the Texas Longhorns. The game looked a lot like the earlier game against OU, but it ended in a slightly different way. The senior guard Shane Southwell had the ball with only a little bit of time left. He drove the ball all the way across the court and made a very difficult floater look easy while tying the game at 64. The game was going into overtime unless Texas could score, and they did. A freshman guard named Jonathan Holmes shot a fade-away three pointer with three seconds left and sealed the game. Next the Cats had to play one of the most un-win-able games of the year at Iowa State. The Cyclones are one of the best 3-point shooting teams in the nation, and they are nearly unbeatable at home. I don't really want to talk about it.

The next game was against the Texas Tech Red Raiders (try to say that five times fast... nevermind, it isn't really that hard). This was a game where the Senior guard Will Spradling really came alive and scored 17 points. The Cats won this low-scoring game 66-58 by playing the same shut down defense that they had used all season. The next test was at WVU, and it was horrible. The team that we had held to 56 in the first game put up 81 on us in the second.

At this point everyone started noticing a pattern with K-State. We always won at home and never (except TCU) won on the road. The team needed to end that trend if they wanted to get into the tournament with a good seed....