Fear the beard.
Some may think Kansas State has risen to No. 5 in the latest Associated Press college basketball poll on the strength of Frank Martin’s inspired coaching and arguably the best guard tandem in college basketball in Jacob Pullen and Denis Clemente.
But it just may be Pullen’s Abe Lincoln-style beard that has the Wildcats standing 24-4 (11-3 in the Big 12) and ranked in the top five for the first time since 1962.
The student body began imitating Pullen’s growth on the night of K-State’s January upset of then-undefeated Texas. The normally highstrung Martin was so taken with the 1,000 or so fake beards distributed by the school’s marketing department that he wore one to the Texas postgame news conference
The idea since has grown so much on Wildcats fans that KSU athletic director and former Tennessee associate AD John Currie said Monday, “I saw this 2-year-old kid at one game and his parents had taken a marker and drawn a beard on his face.