by Dick Weiss, for The American
PHILADELPHIA -- Wichita State made its first official appearance at the American Athletic Conference’s men’s basketball media day on Monday at the Airport Marriott.
The afterglow was significant.
The Shockers, who left the Valley after 72 years, formally joining The American on July 1, are one of the best coached, undervalued, dangerous teams in the country. They return 12 lettermen - including all five starters - from an NCAA team that won 31 games, shared a regular season title, won the MVC tournament and pushed Kentucky to the limit in a 65-62 loss as a number 10 seed in the second-round of the NCAA Tournament in Indianapolis last March.
Wichita State has won 30 or more games in four of the last five years, had an unbeaten regular season team in 2014 and won a game in the tournament for five consecutive seasons, reaching the Final Four in 2013.
The Shockers should start the 2017-18 season ranked in the Top 10. Wichita State will be challenged, playing at least 15 opponents that posted top 100 RPI’s last year, and at least half their games will be televised on ESPN, ESPN2 or CBS.
Even though The American coaches voted Gregg Marshall’s Shockers second in the league’s preseason poll, there are those who feel Wichita State has a legitimate shock to make the Final Four if Marshall’s two stars - 6-4 sophomore point guard Landry Shamet, a pre-season Blue Ribbon All American who has brought back fond memories of Fred VanVleet and Ron Baker; and 6-8 junior power forward Markis McDuffie, are healthy and ready to play.
Shamet suffered a fracture in his foot in July and his status is up in the air until November. The versatile McDuffie, who became the first Shocker in 23 years to lead the team in scoring and rebounding and is as versatile as any forward in the country, is recovering from a stress fracture in the navicular bone of his left foot and is due back in December. Marshall is hopeful both injuries are temporary setbacks. He has big plans for this team.
This is a brave new world, but Wichita State is the perfect team to make the jump to The American. The Shockers are loaded with talent and depth, averaging 81 points and hitting a school-record 310 three-point goals last season. Defensively, the Shockers were ranked 14
th in scoring defense, limiting opposing teams to just 62.4 points per game with their fierce intensity.
Best of all, the Shockers are excited to be in The American, where the conference appears ready to re-explode as several teams enter the season with NCAA Tournament expectations.
“It’s a win, win,” Marshall said. “When you’re making deal, a trade at baseball deadline, both teams want to win. Somebody needs a relief pitcher somebody needs a power bat. In this case I hope we bring The American NCAA tournament appearances, which translates into hard cash. We hope to make that happen for the league. I’m sure they think that’s a possibility. That’s why we got invited.
“We don’t know what they feel. We know what we feel. In the past, nothing against Carbondale, Peoria, or Cedar Falls now you got Orlando, Dallas, New Orleans, Houston, and Cincinnati. Maybe we can catch an NBA game or get a nice steak.”
Or at the least, a decent seed and a better shot an at-large bid.
Marshall’s 455-173 record and 13 NCAA appearances in 19 years at Winthrop and Wichita State speaks for itself. But it hasn’t always been easy.
“In 2007, my last year at Winthrop, we were 29-5, ranked in the Top 25 and won the only game the Big South ever won in the NCAA tournament when we beat Notre Dame as a number 11 seed,” Marshall said. “Before the tournament, we were unbeaten in the Big South. We cashed three checks at East Carolina, Old Dominion and Mississippi State. We lost to North Carolina by seven, lost to Wisconsin in overtime, lost to Billy Gillespie’s last team at Texas A&M and lost to Maryland. If we hadn’t won the conference tournament, we wouldn’t have gotten in.
“I felt then, I needed to go to a league that got multiple bids. The year before I arrived at Wichita in 2006, the Valley got four bids. Two teams got to the Sweet 16, and one of them was Wichita State. In my ten years in the Valley, we were the only team to get an at-large bid. It was really hard. It always came down to the last week. I don’t think that will happen in this league. We play nine non-league games against teams that went to postseason and we’ll play six-to-10 games against teams in our conference that will go to the postseason. If you follow college basketball, you know whenever we get into the NCAA Tournament, we tend to be dreadfully under-seeded. Maybe this will help.”
Marshall has built a reputation for recruiting players who were diamonds in the rough, then turning them into stars. He found Shamet playing for an unsponsored AAU team, the Kansas City Pumas, out-recruiting marquee schools because Marshall had signed another player from the same team – 7-foot center Greg Stutz – when he first arrived. Stutz had a great career before playing overseas.
“It shows you don’t have to play in Nike's EBYL or for an Adidas or Under Armour team to make it,” Shamet said.
McDuffie came with a higher profile. He played for fabled Hall of Fame coach Bob Hurley, Sr. at St. Anthony’s of Jersey City. Marshall convinced McDuffie to visit, but he almost never made it to campus when his flight to Wichita was cancelled in Chicago because of a snow storm.
“We finally got him out here,” Marshall said. “His mother Sandra was the biggest sell. He was the baby in the family.”
McDuffie wound up being the Rookie of the Year in the Valley as a freshman before becoming a first team All-MVC selection last season along with Shamet.
Senior guard Connor Frankamp and 6-8 forward Shaquille Morris were both third team All-MVC picks and rugged 6-6 senior forward Zach Brown made the MVC All-Defensive team. Frankamp, a transfer from Kansas, started the season at the point, then moved to off guard once Shamet took over at that spot, is a potential game changer when he is dialed in on his three-point shooting.
Wichita fans have fallen in love with this program. The team plays its home games at 10,500-seat Charles Koch Arena, known as the Roundhouse. The Shockers have had 176 straight games where attendance has been over 10,000. “We don’t have football here,’’ Marshall said. “They don’t wear helmets in Wichita, so, there are no distractions. It’s all about basketball.’’
The fans travel too. “I've been to Allen Fieldhouse (at Kansas),” Shamet said. “This is comparable.”
The Shockers are all the rage in the heartland. “We want to play on the biggest stage,” McDuffie said. “We want to show the world what we got.”