MANHATTAN — Jerome Tang and Kansas State basketball keep making headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Tang’s postgame outburst, combined with students in the K-State student section wearing brown paper bags over their heads during the Wildcats’ 91-62 loss to Cincinnati, has gone viral, and several national outlets picked up the story.
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Kansas State basketball, amid a five-game losing streak and 1-10 start to Big 12 play, is starting to get more heat nationally, especially as the temperature underneath Tang’s seat continues to rise after each loss and attention-grabbing postgame press conference.
“The Kansas State situation is now one of the biggest disappointments in Power 5 basketball,” CBS Sports insider Jon Rothstein said after the game. “It is one thing to lose games in the Big 12; it is another thing to show zero, zero resistance, which is what the Wildcats did tonight on their home court. This has been a reoccuring patern for Kansas State; it happened a couple of weeks ago against Iowa State at home.
“I know the Big 12 is the best conference in college basketball, but you had an opponent in Cincinnati that was extremely vulnerable just a couple of weeks ago. Kansas State, right now, is in a real compromising situation, not just from a one-loss perspective, but also in terms of the fight being shown in that program.”
Clips of Tang’s outburst were also featured on SportsCenter and during a three-plus-minute segment on Pardon The Interuption, in which host Tony Kornheiser pointed out that Tang recruited the roster that Tang said didn’t deserve to wear a Kansas State uniform.
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“The team he has right now, he clearly hates,’ Kornheiser said.
“If I was the athletic director or president of Kansas State University, I would call Coach Tang and tell him, ‘You have until the TV trucks get here at 5 o’clock for local news to get down there with something purple and a logo and walk this back,'” Michael Wilbon added. “That’s how long you got, because I will also terminate you for cause, and there may not be a buyout. You can’t go this far.”
Multiple national outlets have listed Tang as on the hot seat, including The Athletic and On3. On Thursday, Feb. 12, The Athletic cited industry sources in saying Kansas State would consider paying Tang the $18.675 million he’d be due if he were bought out before April 30.
That figure was written on at least one bag that a student was wearing, pleading for donors to step forward and “save the program.” The bag-wearing students have made appearances in multiple viral TikTok and X posts, along with articles in People.com, The Athletic and USA TODAY.
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One of the students wearing a bag told the Capital-Journal that they wore them to send a message, hoping for accountability, while also saying they were tired of excuses from Tang’s multiple attention-grabbing headlines before the coach exclaimed that his players didn’t deserve to wear a K-State jersey and that few of them would be allowed to return next season.
Four of Kansas State’s last five games have seen Tang grab headlines. After the Wildcats lost by 24 to Kansas after trailing by just four with under eight minutes left, Tang called out his team’s competitiveness. After their loss at West Virginia, Tang took a shot at the NCAA for inconsistent eligibility rules, while also placing some of the blame on the NCAA for the Wildcats’ struggles.
After Kansas State’s 34-point home loss to Iowa State on Feb. 1, Tang said he wasn’t disappointed in his players and was proud of their effort, although we’ve been told that the Wildcats were dealing with a serious private issue involving Mobi Ikegwuruka, nothing involving the law, ahead of the game.
Tang made it through the Wildcats’ 18-point collapse at TCU without a problem, but Tang and the Wildcats then suffered their third consecutive home loss by 24 or more points.
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Not to mention, a graduate assistant on Kansas State’s staff was arrested on a domestic battery charge on Feb. 9, leading to an indefinite suspension as the court process plays out.
“This was embarrassing,” Tang said of his team’s performance on Wednesday. “These dudes do not deserve to wear this uniform, and there will be very few of them in it next year. I’m embarrassed for the university, I’m embarrassed for our fans, and our student section. It’s just ridiculous.”
Kansas State will return to the court to play *gulp* at No. 3 Houston on Saturday, Feb. 13, for a 3 p.m. tip.
Wyatt D. Wheeler covers Kansas State athletics for the USA TODAY Network and Topeka Capital-Journal. You can follow him on X at @WyattWheeler_, contact him at 417-371-6987 or email him at wwheeler@usatodayco.com
This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Jerome Tang’s K-State job in question after student protests, scrutiny
