Slate: The Return of Paradox

Basketball

It’s now officially official: Shane Southwell has been hired as K-State’s newest men’s basketball assistant coach. Southwell returns to the Kansas State Wildcats after spending a year as an assistant at Robert Morris, helping the Colonials to a Northeast Conference title (and eyeing a potential 1/16 match-up with the Jayhawks) before the season was cut short. After Southwell finished his Wildcat career in 2014, he played professionally for a couple seasons before returning to K-State as a graduate assistant for the 2017 season. Before the start of the 2019-20 season, he was set to take over as the Director of Student Athlete Development, replacing the promoted Jermaine Henderson, before deciding instead to take the assistant position offered at Robert Morris. He was also part of Bruce Weber’s 2019 FIBA Under-19 World Cup Gold Medal-winning staff this past summer. If you’re counting at home, that means Paradox has been a player or coach on four different collegiate-level teams that have won a championship in the last decade. That’s pretty solid.

Cartier Diarra, who many expect to still test the pro waters, has found a new collegiate home. As announced yesterday on his personal Instagram account, Diarra will finish his collegiate eligibility (should he stay) with the Virginia Tech Hokies, reuniting him with former Wildcat assistant coach Chester Frazier. Frazier was Diarra’s lead recruiter out of high school, rumoredly needing to talk Bruce Weber in to taking a chance on the guard from South Carolina. This is probably the best possible outcome for next season for both K-State and Cartier, and we here at BotC wish him well at his new school.

In other basketball news, women’s basketball star Peyton Williams was named to the 2020 Senior CLASS Award All-America Second Team. She becomes just the sixth player in program history to earn Senior CLASS Award All-America honors and the first since Brittany Chambers in the 2013 season. Congrats Peyton!

Football

YES, football news! Or a story at least. Whatever, we’re just excited there’s something that football related, and positive, to talk about. Anyway....

Kellis Robinett, via the Wichita Eagle (who I have gladly put on the exempt list from my ad-blocker since they keep most of their sports stories up for “free” and they can use the ad money), reports on K-State QB Skylar Thompson and the alternative that he’s found to spring football while riding out the pandemic in Kansas City.

We have a general policy here to avoid reporting on things that happen down the river. But this is just too incredible to not share. KU has been fighting to not pay David Beatty his $3mil buyout after firing him prior to the end of the 2018 football season (a paltry sum for FBS athletics in 2020 (or even 2018 when he was fired)). That fight means lawyers, and courts, and depositions, and now the airing of even more dirty laundry surrounding KU Athletics (seriously, this is the reason that place stinks so much). Jesse Newell and Steve Vockrodt at the KC Star (via the Eagle here), dug into the mess to bring you all the sordid details. It’s...something.

Miscellany

It’s not every day that I get to write the Slate on a special day for me. But while 2020 is going nuts around us, it did leave me with one little gem: Today, April 1st, is my mother’s birthday!! So happy birthday Mom, looks like you get treated this year instead of tricked :-P