Beasley Sticks With KSU

You can put the phone down, Sidney. (You should never have picked it up in the first place...)

Michael Beasley will honor a signed national letter of intent with Kansas State and play for the Wildcats next season, his mother told CBS SportsLine.com on Saturday morning.

Kansas State did what it had to in order to preserve whatever near-term success the basketball program has coming to it. The the school is getting hammered by the Kansas City Star for hiring Frank Martin, though.

Jason Whitlock:

Bob Huggins is a genius.

He squeezed 23 victories out of the players Jim Wooldridge left behind, rehabilitated his image just enough to get back into a basketball conference and, most remarkably, instructed Frank Martin and Dalonte Hill on how to hoodwink and bamboozle Jon Wefald and Tim Weiser into astronomical pay raises and job titles they’re not qualified for.

[snip]

The program is a complete laughingstock. It’s an embarrassment to the Big 12. Seriously, conference commissioner Kevin Wieberg should intervene and at the very least object to the irrational decision Wefald and Weiser made, appointing Martin head coach and Hill associate head coach at Kansas State.

Frank Martin was run out of Florida high school coaching because of major recruiting violations. Salary and responsibility won’t improve his ethics. He is what he is, a recruiter, a person perfectly comfortable wading through the muck and corruption of the child-peddling world that is college recruiting.

You don’t hire a head coach based on one recruiting class. You hire assistant coaches for recruits.

Joe Posnanski:

Friday, Kansas State hired Frank Martin to be the coach. Who is Frank Martin? He is a 41-year-old former Kansas State assistant coach known for being a relentless recruiter. He also was fired as a high school basketball coach in Miami in 1998 for violations the Florida High School Athletic Association called “more excessive than any school ever investigated.” Martin denied any wrongdoing, but it should be said that his work at Miami Senior High was so over-the-top scandalous, he merited an entire chapter in the book: Sole Influence: Basketball, Corporate Greed and the Corruption of America’s Youth.