No program in college basketball has lived a wilder four-year swing than Kansas State. In March of 2023, the Wildcats were in the Elite Eight, Jerome Tang was the Naismith National Coach of the Year, and Bramlage Coliseum — the Octagon of Doom — was the loudest room in the sport. Three years later, Tang was fired mid-season after a profane public rant against his own players, fans were wearing paper bags over their heads with his $18.7 million buyout figure written on them, and the program had cratered to 12-20 and 15th place in the Big 12. Now the reset is official: Casey Alexander, the longtime Belmont head coach, takes over for 2026-27. The Tang era — lightning in a bottle, then a thunderstorm — is over. What comes next will define Kansas State basketball for a decade.
The 2022-23 season still feels like a dream in Manhattan. Tang, hired off Scott Drew’s Baylor staff, inherited a roster nobody respected and turned it into the nation’s best story: 26 wins, a third-place Big 12 finish, and a March run to the Elite Eight behind Markquis Nowell’s wizardry and Keyontae Johnson’s toughness. Tang danced with students, wore the vest, talked about faith and joy, and looked like the Big 12’s next fixture. The Naismith Coach of the Year award was the coronation. The expectation was a dynasty. The reality was a cliff.
Year two brought 19 wins and a first-round NIT exit. Year three — 2024-25 — dipped below .500 at 16-17 despite one of the transfer portal’s highest earners, Illinois star Coleman Hawkins, and Michigan guard Dug McDaniel. The roster churn became the story: Achor Achor departed the team mid-season after a loss at St. John’s, and the chemistry never cohered. Then came 2025-26, the season that ended the Tang era. It started with genuine promise — a 5-0 opening with wins over California, Tulsa, and Mississippi State, an exciting retooled offense built around Memphis transfer P.J. Haggerty — and then disintegrated. Injuries gutted the rotation: Monmouth transfer Abdi Bashir missed over a month after surgery, Mobi Ikegwuruka stepped away for personal reasons, and a graduate assistant, former Baylor player Mark Vital, was arrested on a domestic battery charge. The losing piled up. The crowds shrank.
The breaking point was pure spectacle. After a 91-62 home demolition by Cincinnati — the program’s third straight home loss by 24 or more — Tang went to the podium and detonated: “These dudes do not deserve to wear this uniform,” he said, adding there would be “very few of them” in it next year. He stripped the players’ names off the backs of the jerseys for the next game against Houston. The rant went viral, the paper bags appeared in the student section, and on February 15, athletic director Gene Taylor fired him “for cause” — a designation that set up a legal fight over the $18.675 million buyout, the 12th-largest in college basketball. Associate head coach Matthew Driscoll finished the season as interim, going 2-5, and the year ended with a 105-91 Big 12 tournament loss to BYU. Tang’s final ledger: 71-57 overall, 29-39 in the Big 12, one shining March and three years of drift.
There were bright spots in the rubble. Haggerty, the Memphis transfer, was everything advertised as a scorer — his 34-point eruption against Baylor in Driscoll’s interim debut, paired with Nate Johnson’s 33, made them the first Wildcat duo to drop 30 apiece in the same game since 2008 and the fifth duo in Big 12 history to do it. Johnson’s senior-year scoring gave K-State fans something to cheer in the bleakest weeks. But individual explosions couldn’t mask a program that had lost its way — tactically, culturally, and in the stands.
Enter Casey Alexander. The hire is a fascinating pivot: from Tang’s charisma-and-portal volatility to one of the steadiest program-builders in the mid-major ranks. Alexander spent seven seasons as Belmont’s head coach, winning with precision offense, player development, and rosters built to last rather than rented for a year. Before that, he was Rick Byrd’s longtime lieutenant during Belmont’s rise. He’s never coached in a power conference — this is the leap — but his track record suggests exactly what Kansas State needs: structure, identity, and patience. The 2026-27 season, the program’s 124th, begins with a coach who builds programs the old-fashioned way.
The bones of the place remain strong. Bramlage Coliseum, when it’s full, is still one of the great home courts in America — the Octagon of Doom nickname wasn’t marketing, it was earned, and the student section that once partied with Tang can be re-engaged by a winner. The history is real: four Final Fours (1948, 1951, 1958, 1964), Elite Eight runs in 2018 under Bruce Weber and 2023 under Tang, the Bob Huggins one-year lightning strike of 2006-07 with Michael Beasley and Bill Walker, the Frank Martin era’s toughness, and legends like Mitch Richmond and Rolando Blackman. Kansas State has been nationally relevant in every decade since the 1940s. The last three years are the anomaly, not the norm.
The Big 12, though, is the unforgiving part. This is the nation’s deepest league — Houston, Kansas, Iowa State, and a nightly gauntlet where a rebuilding roster gets exposed fast. Alexander’s first job is triage: stabilize the roster, recruit to a system, and make Bramlage a place opponents fear again. The portal will be his immediate tool, but the long game is culture — the thing that evaporated in the Tang era’s final act.
What defines Kansas State right now is the distance between memory and reality. The memory: March 2023, the Elite Eight, the joy, the noise. The reality: paper bags, a for-cause firing, and a 15th-place finish. Casey Alexander wasn’t hired to recreate the lightning. He was hired to build something that doesn’t need lightning — a program sturdy enough to win in the Big 12 every year. In Manhattan, after the wildest four-year swing in the sport, sturdy sounds like a miracle.
