Winners and Losers: Kansas State has tournament life

KSO covers the biggest winners and losers in the world of Kansas State and college athletics.

Winners

1.) College football fans: EA Sports College Football ’25 is a real thing. It is coming to fruition. Kansas State is in the game. And each player will be receiving compensation of at least $600 and a free game.
2.) Tournament life: After a win over BYU, K-State has a bit of a heartbeat when it comes to tournament chances. Will they make the NCAA Tournament? There’s plenty of work left to do, but Saturday’s victory gives them a fighting shot. Even Joe Lunardi mentioned them in his ESPN bracketology sheet.
3.) Avery: Speaking of the return of the college football video game, Avery Johnson is one of the players that will be receiving additional funds through NIL in exchange for helping to promote the game. That probably means the Kansas State quarterback will have a pretty favorable rating as well.
4.) Power Two: To no surprise, both the Big Ten and SEC are playing a bit of hardball when it comes to negotiations for the new television contract and College Football Playoff proposal. They want even more of the payout and to be guaranteed four playoff spots each in the next rendition of the sport. That’s good news for them but bad for everyone else.
5.) K-State: It wasn’t just a good weekend for the basketball team. Chris Klieman and K-State landed 2025 quarterback Dillon Duff of St. Louis. The future Wildcat wasted no time in deciding that he wanted to play for new assistant coach Matt Wells.

Losers

1.) Filipowski: I’m not going to dive into the debate of whether or not to ban court-storming. I realize the potential problems of it, but I think it can still be done if managed correctly. It was not by Wake Forest. However, what I do know is that Kyle Filipowski was pretty dramatic in how he conducted himself, both by his actions and words. An argument can be made that some of what happened was self-inflicted by him. He’s also out of his mind if he thinks it was intentional or someone was punching him in the back as he stated afterwards.
2.) Evolution of the sport: I’m just kind of sick of the direction of the sport. We’ll see if there’s some return to normalcy after a while but television networks have eliminated rivalries, consolidated the sport, removed the regionalization of it and stripped college athletics of its charm and pageantry. Instead of being excited for seasons, we’re left debating which schools are getting left behind and discussing the financial gap that keeps increasing.
3.) Boynton: I thought we were going to see a significant home win for Mike Boynton at Oklahoma State. We finally saw a great crowd at Gallagher-Iba Arena when they hosted Oklahoma for the final time, only for the Sooners to win in overtime on a buzzer-beater. Heartbreak.
4.) Bearcats: Another team in free fall is Cincinnati. That could be a good thing for Kansas State since they head to Fifth Third Arena next weekend in what will still be a quad one win opportunity.
5.) Pitching: Pete Hughes’ club is now 3-3 after a stinker of a loss to Holy Cross on Saturday. Pitching continues to fail K-State early in the season. They’re walking batters, hitting batters and giving up too many home runs.