‘We couldn’t hear the play-calls’: Rowdy home-court advantage returns at Kansas State

The Octagon of Doom is back.

It has been a while since Kansas State basketball fans have filled Bramlage Coliseum with enough noise and excitement to refer to their home arena with an intimidating nickname, but there was nothing quiet or dull about the atmosphere surrounding a 65-57 victory over Oklahoma State on Tuesday.

A sellout crowd of 11,000 packed the place for a 6 p.m. tipoff and roared as No. 11 K-State pulled away from OSU in the final minute. Fans let the refs hear it after every call that didn’t go the Wildcats’ way. The crowd was so loud that both teams had trouble communicating when K-State was on defense. And the place went bonkers when Keyontae Johnson threw down an alley-oop pass from Markquis Nowell for a game-clinching dunk with 38 seconds remaining.

“One of the best crowds I have ever been around,” Johnson said afterward. “It was loud. We couldn’t hear the play calls.”

Get used to it. Bramlage is only going to get louder when rival Kansas visits Manhattan for one of the most highly anticipated Sunflower Showdown basketball games in recent memory next week.

K-State just played in front of its first sellout crowd since before the coronavirus pandemic began. It might not play in front of another unsold seat at home the rest of the season.

The Wildcats have already announced that five more of their upcoming home games have also sold out. That is what happens when a new coach arrives and leads the team to an improbable 15-1 start, which includes a 4-0 mark in Big 12 play.

Jerome Tang has worked tirelessly to build an immediate winner in Manhattan. He has arguably worked even harder to try and win over fans by schmoozing with them at countless public events. The combination has worked. K-State has a home-court advantage again. The Octagon of Doom is once again rocking like it used to under former coaches Frank Martin and Bruce Weber, when they had ranked teams.

“The fans all around were terrific,” Tang said. “When I thought of coming here and having the opportunity to coach here that’s what I envisioned. I knew we had to do our part and put a product on the floor that would get our fans excited about sacrificing a two-hour drive to be here on a weekday. I was thankful that we did that, and then they responded.”

Sellout crowds are a big change at K-State.

Empty seats grew more and more noticeable near the end of Weber’s tenure in Manhattan. There were many games that were less than half full. Nowell remembers playing in front of sparse crowds a season ago. He much prefers the new atmosphere inside Bramlage.

Call it a perk of being on a team that has already eclipsed its win total from 2021-22.

“I heard all of it and it’s pretty huge,” Nowell said. “You try to stay locked in and you try to stay in the moment and not let the crowd get to you because it’s a long game, but you hear it. Shoutout to the fans. They were great.”

The crowd seemed to give K-State its biggest boost in the final minutes.

Oklahoma State guard Chris Harris made a three to pull Oklahoma State within one point at 56-55 with 3:53 remaining. It was anybody’s game. But then the Wildcats turned up their intensity on defense. With the crowd behind them, they limited the Cowboys to one bucket the rest of the way.

“I feel like that’s one of the best crowds I’ve ever been in,” K-State guard Desi Sills said, “even though I used to play at Arkansas. We have got one of the best fan bases in the nation. Matter of fact, they are the best in the country. Without them, I don’t feel like we come out with the win like we did. They brought the energy and we fed off of it.”