Kansas State’s reset is already drawing a cold read from one of college basketball’s most recognizable insiders.
After a rough 2025-26 season, the Wildcats wiped the slate clean with a new head coach and an entirely new roster. The idea is simple enough: change the approach, change the energy, and hope a fresh start can pull the program out of its recent slide.
But from the outside, there isn’t much reason for instant optimism. With no star power and no familiar holdovers, Kansas State doesn’t exactly project as a team ready to make a quick leap.
Jon Rothstein is clearly not buying into a fast turnaround.
The college basketball insider has a rough declaration for Kansas State in 2026, and it fits the general skepticism surrounding the program. Even after the overhaul, the Wildcats are still being viewed as a team that may need time before it looks anything close to stable.
New coach Casey Alexander is the one tasked with making it all work, and he’s not pretending the job is small. He’s stepping into a situation where the roster has been stripped down and rebuilt, and that means the early stages will be about teaching, sorting, and trying to create chemistry from scratch. Still, Alexander sounds ready for it.
"It's more difficult any time that you have a significant number of new players," Alexander said in his Big 12 interview. "And in this case, for me, everybody's new.
But even for Kansas State, everybody’s new except for one. So we have a lot of work to do, but there’s plenty of time to do it.
I’m excited about that challenge."
That’s the reality for Kansas State now: a full reset, a long list of unknowns, and a coach trying to build something new while the outside world waits to see whether the rebuild can move faster than expected.
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