Jim Mashek

WKU STILL LOOKING FOR FIRST NCAA TOURNAMENT BERTH SINCE 2013

It was December 29, 2022, at WKU’s E.A. Diddle Arena.

Western Kentucky’s seventh-year coach, Rick Stansbury, was sidelined that night, and it would be the first of nine games away from his WKU men’s basketball team.

Stansbury would be forced to take a monthlong sabbitcal for an undisclosed illness. He’d miss those nine games, all of them Conference USA contests.

It was that night, just before the calendar turned to a new year, that seemed particularly ominous.

The opponent was Rice University.

One of the perennial also-rans in a conference that seems to have membership changes every other weekend. A small, private school in Houston, a place I know pretty well from my childhood.

Not an athletic power, not since the days of Jess Neely roaming the football sideline at massive Rice Stadium, on the 6100 block of Main Street.

Mr. Neely passed away 40 years ago.

The Hilltoppers and Rice were locked up in a tight one, with Western holding the lead for more than 26 minutes. The Owls were tenacious, however, and in the second half, they hit 9 of 15 shots from 3-point range. They turned back the Tops, 81-78, and triggered a slide that got worse with each and every game.

Phil Cunningham was filling in for Stansbury that night, and he’s an able, loyal assistant coach. The Hilltoppers’ associate head coach was put in a tough situation, as this would be the barometer by which Rick Stansbury’s seven-year tenure would be evaluated.

WKU athletics director Todd Stewart was in the school’s Paul Just Media Room that night.

There were the usual suspects, four or five print/internet reporters, both Bowling Green TV stations, a handful of hangers on. It was kind of glum in there.

And Stewart’s body language was the tip-off.

The longtime Hilltoppers AD was on his cell phone, seldom looking up at the press conference itself. He was stoic, yes, but he was clearly concerned.

And, as it turns out, he had a right to be.

Western bottomed out in Stansbury’s final season, one in which the Hilltoppers barely broke a .500 record with a 17-16 finish. Their Conference USA Tournament was more of the same, as WKU slipped past UTEP, 73-67, to reach the quarterfinals against regular-season champion Florida Atlantic University.

FAU crushed the Hilltoppers’ spirit, winning 75-51 at The Star in Frisco, Texas. (The Conference USA Tournament should be held somewhere else, ANYWHERE else, but the membership is all over the place, anyway, what with three time zones and more membership changes on the horizon for the 2023-24 school year.)

Stansbury and the Hilltoppers were back on campus Friday, and we probably should have seen it coming.

On Saturday afternoon, the university announced that Rick Stansbury wouldn’t be back for an eighth season with Western.

It was inevitable, of course.

Everyone knew it.

Still, the finality of it all, after the occasional bright spot and the soul-crushing defeats — like, say, North Texas 67, WKU 33 on March 4 in Denton, Texas — told you it was coming.

Stansbury was gracious, in the news release announcing he was stepping down.

His health was a concern. Had to be. But the bottom line is the Hilltoppers didn’t win enough.

Not when they had to. Not when it mattered most. And not with the kind of talent Stansbury, Cunningham and the rest of the WKU coaching staff had assembled for the 2022-23 season.

There was Dayvion McKnight, a hard-nosed, talented junior point guard from Shelbyville.

There was the 7-foot-5 center Jamarion Sharp, who led the nation in blocked shots.

There were perimeter guys, plenty of them, players such as 6-foot-8 guard Emmanuel Akot, backup guards like Jordan Rawls and Khristian Lander, small forward Jairus Hamilton, and of course, sixth-year senior Luke Frampton, the Hilltoppers’ gritty 6-foot-5 guard from Poca, West Virginia.

On the surface, there was a lot of talent for Stansbury to work with.

But the experiments were seldom successful beyond the lab.

You could see it on Todd Stewart’s face that cold December night.

Stansbury wouldn’t be back for about a month. Phil Cunningham guided the Hilltoppers to consecutive victories over Texas-San Antonio, UAB and Florida International. Cunningham posted a 3-6 record in Stansbury’s stead, and little changed when Stansbury returned.

So the WKU administration pulled the plug, because it had to.

As Stewart told a handful of media representatives on a Zoom conference call on Saturday, more is expected at WKU.

A lot more.

The HIlltoppers haven’t been to the NCAA Tournament since 2013, and they’ve never gotten there as a member of Conference USA.

“The NCAA Tournament drought, that’s a big frustration for everybody,” Stewart said.

You could see it on the players’ faces. You could see it in the fans’ faces. Night in, night out.

And Stewart noted that GETTING to the tournament is great, but WINNING once you get there is equally important.

It’s Ty Rogers’ buzzer beater to beat Drake, 101-99, in overtime in WKU’s first-round NCAA Tournament game in Tampa, Florida, in 2008.

It’s Courtney Lee, an NBA first-round draft pick, that year, and the Hilltoppers’ Sweet Sixteen appearance under Darrin Horn, a former WKU player who became the school’s head coach.

It’s Clem Haskins and Chris Marcus and Tellis Frank and, of course, Jim McDaniels, Johnny Britt and the 1971 Western squad that dismantled the University of Kentucky on its way to the Final Four, in Houston.

My family had moved from Houston to Potomac, Maryland the previous summer, and my parents, the late John and Sara Mashek, never left metropolitan Washington.

Me? I had to. I have to get out and see different things. New places. Explore the world best I can.

I walked on with the WKU football team in 1974, kicked around and had a lot of fun and learned enough to get my diploma four years later, and I remember one of the highlights of my four years at Western:

Beating Syracuse in the first round of the NCAA Tournament in 1978, while we were on spring break. Magic Johnson and Michigan State took care of the Hilltoppers with little trouble, and WKU barely broke .500 that season, but Jim Richards’ Hilltoppers squad won the Ohio Valley Conference Tournament.

So they got that chance.

It’s a bottom line business, as Todd Stewart told us on Saturday.

Everything is evaluated by what happens in March.

And here we are.

“We’ve actually won just four NCAA Tournament games in the last 28 years,” Steward said. “Darrin Horn had two of them, Ken McDonald one, and Ray Harper, one … Our bar is always going to be high, we’re always going to aim high.

“That’ll always remain our top goal.”

On a personal note, it’s hard to see Rick Stansbury’s shot at WKU come and go.

I met him when he was an assistant coach at Mississippi State, when the Bulldogs made a Sweet Sixteen appearance — WKU assistant coach Marcus Grant was a sharp-shooting swingman from Macon, Georgia, on that team — followed by their magical run to an SEC Tournament championship in New Orleans and the Final Four in East Rutherford, New Jersey.

Richard Williams, who was near the end of his tenure as the Mississippi State head coach, stepped down after the 1997-98 season. Stansbury was simultatenously announced as Williams’ successor, and he became a popular figure on the MSU campus.

Stansbury was the Bulldogs’ head coach for 14 seasons, and they had plenty of success in the regular season. Covered their run to the NIT Final Four in 2007. I was at the Biloxi-Gulfport newspaper for 17 years, covering the SEC and the New Orleans Saints, the occasional high school game, and I knew the way to Starkvegas.

I got laid off by that newspaper in 2011, and Stansbury was supportive. Likewise, Cunningham, Grant and others. I came to Bowling Green in 2019, in pretty rough shape after a disastrous 3.5-year turn in Owensboro, and those guys COULDN’T have been more supportive.

I know how it works in college sports, at WKU. Conference USA is holding the Hilltoppers back, but they’re kind of stuck with each other. Football has been pretty steady under fifth-year coach Tyson Helton, and the school’s women’s athletics programs are largely top-flight — volleyball, basketball, softball.

We’ll see what happens with the coaching search. A lot of names are being floated out there.

Rick Stansbury, I suspect, will fade into the crowd. At least for awhile. He isn’t leaving the cupboard bare, but the NCAA transfer portal could damage the Hilltoppers’ short-range prospects.

We shall see.

Here’s to ya, Stanz. All the best for the future.