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Here it is folks, our first emergency episode of the 20252026 season. It's me. It's Norlander. This is two shows in one day. Never miss a Sunday show. Times two. Jerome Tang has been fired. You're watching this. You saw the thumbnail. You saw it populate your feed. You know what this episode is going to be about for everyone that has woken up on Monday morning. Looking forward to listening to the longer Sunday episode. Go and enjoy that. We actually did talk about Jerome Tang in Kansas State for all of, I don't know, two, two and a half minutes on that. And then two hours after we wrapped thereabouts, Jerome Tang was fired by Kansas State. So I'm going to give you the basics off the top as I know him at this hour as we go live here on YouTube. If you are watching live. Thank you for dipping in real quick. We did get some comments to do an emergency podcast. I'm here. GP is out of pocket. It's a Sunday night. We thought we were going to be able to relax. That's not where we're at. Kansas State is meeting as a team right now as we speak. I have been told Matthew Driscoll will be the interim coach. That has not been confirmed to me as we go live here, but he is the associate head coach and I believe the plan is to approach him and ask him to do that. I expect him to say yes. Jerome Tang is out, has not even gotten through four full seasons at Kansas State. He is being fired under the terms of cause for his job termination. Now, that is an important detail here because Kansas State would otherwise owe him north of 18 million. Closing in on 19 million per the terms of his contract. If they fire him for cause, pay him $0. Why for cause? Well, the rant that, that went viral over the past four days is, is what Kansas State is going to lean on here, particularly whether or not it will be successful. That remains to be seen. I am not a lawyer. I have never pretended to be one on this podcast and never will. But per, per the language of his contract, Kansas State, under the terms it could fire him for cause, among other things, would be due to bringing, quote, public disrepute, embarrassment and ridicule, end quote, to the university. Insert your joke about the play on the floor, yada, yada, yada, here we are. To me, it seems a long shot that they will be successful, the university in firing Tang for cause and not having to pay him a cent. My guess is that the lawyers, and I was told the lawyers had been hashing this out for hours at this point. They will try and come to terms and meet somewhere in the middle. We don't want to pay you more than 18 million. We know you're not going to take zero. Do we land on 8, 10, 12, 14 million? Who knows what the number is? It's a ton of money in Kansas State. Money has been the driving force behind this program for the past few years. So why, why Tang? Why now? If you listen to the show, I said all of a few episodes ago, I was actually skeptical they would fire him after this season. Because of that, because of that number. Because it's so big. Well, trying to dodge the number altogether and hit the reboot, hit the reset button in the process, not have a bunch of students show up with bags over their heads on Tuesday in Manhattan for that game against Baylor. It, it went, it went bad real quick for Tang. And a big picture thing for me on this, you know, I think about what's happened at the college football level and in college basketball, but in particular in college football, you see how much money has filtered into the sport because of the portal, because the name, image and likeness, because of roster building, when football programs are spending now easily north of 20, 25, $30 million basketball programs. I mean, the number of programs this season alone before we got to the revenue sharing and the house case settlement that went into effect July 1 when schools were stacking the deck ahead of that and trying to and beat that deadline. I wouldn't be shocked if honestly we had two dozen schools that if you actually were able to peek into the, into the ledger and say okay, how many, how many schools by the end of the 25, 26 season will have paid out its players more than $10 million. If you told me that was two dozen schools, I wouldn't be surprised if that was the number there. Kansas State a couple of years ago was one of the three, four, five biggest spenders in the entire portal. Remember when I got Coleman Hawkins when that class came in and it was a bust and, and so it's not just that the winning hasn't happened and there's a lot of pride at that, at that program. I talked about that on, on Friday show. I believe it's the fact that they go to the tournament in year one, they make the Elite eight. Tang was on top of the world. It was an immediate big time hit. And since then K State was able to spend big in the portal and the returns were not only not good, they have been diminishing. 26 and 10 in year one, 3 seed Elite 8 lose to the FAU team with Dusty May. That makes the final four. Year two, 19 and 15, including an 8 and 10 record in the Big 12 doesn't make the NCAA tournament. That team had Arthur Kaluma on it, David Eng on it. Tyler Perry was on that team. Some misses in the portal there. Year three last season, 16 and 17. Doug McDaniel, Coleman Hawkins, Brendan Houson, Max Jones, David Castillo. It doesn't hit. Then they do it. They go back to the well again. And now we've got a 10 and 15 team that's one in 11 in the league. It's only win is at home by three to Utah which is the only team that rates worse than K State in the Big 12. And you brought in P.J. hagerty as the big time get and he's been a guy that's filled it up with buckets. No translation to winning. This is on pace to be the second worst season for K State in the past two plus decades. In fact you'd have to go back. The only one that was worse was the Weber team. That effectively prompted the end of his tenure although it was his penultimate season. That was The COVID year 2021 finished 9, 20 and 147 at Ken Palm. Right now K State is 101 at Ken Palm. Prior to that you're going back to the Jim Woolridge era around the turn of the century when it was just not a competitive team in the Big 12. When you are going to be afforded a lot of money and I mean a lot of money to build rosters and it's not easy to do like some of these coaches on a year by year basis. They make it look easy. It's not easy to do. The more money that you are given, the more expectations there are. More money, more problems unquestionably. And so Tang becomes not the first but the latest victim of this. This is now the second time in a three year span, by the way, that we have had a high major coach fired on Valentine's weekend. Trivia time for you playing at home. Who was the coach that got it two years ago? Pause it. I'm going to give you the answer in three, two, one. That's right. Chris Altman at Ohio State. That was stunning when that happened. This one may be a little less stunning considering the comments by Tang, the response to that. Obviously taking the names off the back of the, the jerseys over the weekend and the loss at Houston didn't help the cause. And you know athletic director Gene Taylor, school president, they got together on Sunday. They may, they very well may have decided even in advance of the Houston game. But a non win at Houston, you can't be expected to win that one that they were going to move on and in doing so be the first high major team that gets to market. And so here we are with, with, with K State and opening up. Josh is telling me he's got the Tang clip ready. So Josh, why not? Some have heard of this but let's go ahead and play that audio and that video right now for our listeners and viewers to take that in. This is in part in large part from what I understand what is prompting K State to try and fire Tang for cause. Let's hear it.
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Joining us here live courtside.
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I know you're a very frustrated man right now.
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Just your. No, I'm, I'm an embarrassed man. I'm, I'm an embarrassed, I'm embarrassed for our university. I'm embarrassed for our fans. I'm embarrassed for our student section. You know this. None of these dudes deserve to wear this uniform. And we got practice at 6am tomorrow morning and, and folks this thing is going to get changed. Thanks a lot. God bless. Go Cats.
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Thank you coach. Okay, so that was the radio hit. I think it was the press conference. Josh. That was, that is the, the center piece of what, of what's happening here and what he said and how he talked about how embarrassed he was, said players weren't going to be wearing the uniform next season and everything tied to that. So it is wild to see how quickly this is swung. The tang will not be the first. There's going to be more of this. And I'm not saying, you know, under these specific terms in this specific season. Yeah, it's possible for sure. But the pressure on coaches, this isn't absolving anything. I'm just speaking to how it is. It's just never been greater. The amount of intense stress that comes with the job and they are paid so well to do it. So they know the deal and they don't necessarily run from it. But is the reality of the situation when you are tasked with having to turn over 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, sometimes literally 12 or 13 roster spots in a portal cycle and you're just hoping that whatever information you're getting intel from people you know, going deep into the analytics and using a variety of different sources, third party sources, in house sources, hiring gms. Okay, the guys we're bringing in, we think they're good. How are they going to gel as a unit? Is our locker room going to be okay? It might be good in the middle of June. Is this going to be a disaster by the first week of February? I promise you right now there are teams that are pacing toward the NCAA tournament that still it's not the best situation in their locker room right now. Could be worse, could be better. Because it's hard to find that alchemy when you've got a lot of guns for hire being brought aboard. How much is this guy making? How much is that guy making? Are you really in it for the right group collective and the right reasons to do what you seek to do? Sometimes a lot of schools are, but then invariably there will be misses and it can't be perfect every time. And it's also a zero sum game. Someone's got to win, someone's got to lose. We go through this every preseason when we try and assemble our preseason rankings, conference by conference rankings. And there's all these good vibes from the off season. There's just going to be teams that go sideways. It is unavoidable. And so here we have it with Kansas State. I do not have, because frankly, I've been running non stop since this news broke. I do not have a list of candidates for you. Let's let this breathe for a second. And I know that becomes A knee jerk thing. A job comes open. Okay, give me the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 names for will be a job that's coveted to be determined where it falls in the power ranking of this cycle. What jobs will open the money situation. I promise you this. The coach that ultimately is hired to this job whenever that happens. And it's going to be at least a month before we get there. Right. One of the most important conversations that will happen before that coach says yes and before that coach is given the true job opportunity and the the MoU is sent is how much money do I have to work with? How much money are you setting me up to be competitive in in this league on a national level? It is just a thing that athletic directors have to deal with on a very high level. And how we move forward in the rev share era with the CSC and the vetting of nil deals. What can be used and paid for above board versus what can't. You've got collectives. Some of them have been cleared, some of them haven't been cleared. There's still a lot of haziness and fogginess there. So that is going to slightly complicate the hiring process over the next four to six to seven weeks as we, as we get ready for, for what I think will be a pretty busy cycle. I don't think this will be an insane coaching cycle like we had 14 high major flips last season. I'd be surprised if we hit that this time around. But get ready, it is going to be busy. I, I'm looking at the chat here and appreciate anyone hopping online to, to see, to see this, you know, pod in real time. I'm seeing Huggins, his name dropped in here. That would genuinely stun me. I've seen some Brad Underwood. I personally don't expect that whatsoever. There's a lot of good candidates that'll get a good look. It's to be determined if Kansas State seeks to hire a sitting high major coach. If it can lure away a sitting high major coach. Yes, you can throw Josh Shirts his name at the top of every single list of every single vacancy. He's going to be probably the most coveted name. My expectation would be that Shirts will have bigger opportunities and I wouldn't get your hopes up if you're a K State fan. But I guess never say never, right? We'll see. There's, there's some good mid major names out there unquestionably. Jared Calhoun, Utah State gonna get a ton of looks if you're, if you're interested in the Huggins connection there. I mean, Cincinnati fans are already hoping and waiting for shirts or or Calhoun as it speaks. There is still so much to be determined. I know. Fan bases get so eager. Okay, the coach is fired. Let's go. Let's get our next guy. It just While the gears will turn behind the scenes over the next couple of weeks and in essence what will happen here is that Kansas State will open a national search. It will. I'm guessing its athletic director will go to a search firm, which there are cases for and against even doing that to begin with. And I guess he goes and uses a search firm. The search firm will then reach out to a variety of different agents and then over the next couple of weeks, that vetting process and temperature check will be done. They'll hit up the agents. The search firm will do its diligence. Would your guy be interested in K State? Yes. Hard yes. Okay, we'll keep tabs on it. When the time comes, we'll circle back around. No. Okay, maybe. All right, we'll circle back around. But we can't afford to sit here and dance for the next couple of weeks. We're going to need some real clarity. I think the pool will be relatively competitive. So sorry to see Tank fired. Obviously this can be a business that is so brutal. I mean, the highs can feel so high and the lows can feel so low. I mean, so low and in. The irony here is that he gets fired two days before he's supposed to go and host Baylor, which Scott Drew. He was on that staff for two plus decades and helped build Baylor into what it was, which is why he got the job at K State to begin with. So I do want to keep this relatively short. This is an emergency episode. I appreciate everyone for listening and dialing in little bonus content here. We will have another show on Tuesday on CBS Sports Network. Would assume GP wants to dive into that as well. If you are not subscribed to the CBS Sports college basketball YouTube channel, this Let this be the reminder. If you do that, you tap the bell when the show goes live. You can sign up for alerts. So when instances like this happen, if you want to catch it on your phone, feel free to do so. We appreciate you. We. I expect, you know a couple more of these over the next couple of weeks. Few weeks, I should say into March with the emergency episode. So and if you haven't, please do go and rate review the podcast. Help us out if you can. If you're. If you're only audio and and you don't really watch this stuff on YouTube. I get that. But help out the show, subscribe to the channel, do us a solid there. You've helped us really grow in a major way. So we appreciate you so much. Thank you for dialing in. We'll talk to you in a couple days. Let's hope no more fire. Can we get to, can we get to Tuesday morning without another firing? I think we should, but this is, this gets the carousel spinning in a very significant way. So the first one of more to come for the next four, five, six weeks. We appreciate you. We'll talk to you again on Tuesday. Paramount Podcasts we all want to feel good.
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