Kansas State Set to Hire Belmont’s Casey Alexander to Replace Jerome Tang

For its next men’s basketball coach, Kansas State is looking to the south.

The Wildcats are hiring Belmont’s Casey Alexander to replace fired coach Jerome Tang, sources tell Sports Illustrated on Thursday night. Terms of the agreement are being finalized.

Alexander, 53, has served as the Bruins’ boss since the 2020 season. He went 166–60 with Belmont, winning three regular-season conference titles and helping Belmont transition from the Ohio Valley to the Missouri Valley. The Chattanooga, Tenn., native has also previously coached Stetson and Lipscomb, making his only career NCAA tournament appearance in 2019 with the latter program. He won a conference tournament in 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic forced the season’s end.

Kansas State is starting from scratch after a miserable 2026 campaign that included Tang’s Feb. 15 firing, which followed his public denigration of the program’s players after a 91–62 home loss to Cincinnati four days prior. Tang had taken the Wildcats to the Elite Eight just three years prior. Ex-North Florida coach Matthew Driscoll stepped in as the program’s interim boss in the wake of Tang’s exit, leading the team to a 2–5 record.

Belmont went 26–6 this season, exiting the Missouri Valley tournament after a stunning 100–79 loss at the hands of an unheralded Drake team.

Kansas State moving on from Tang in February gave the Wildcats a head start in the market, allowing athletic Gene Taylor to more aggressively court a number of the top candidates on the market while others waited for their seasons to end to make a change. His eventual choice, Alexander, became fully available sooner than expected after losing in the quarterfinals of the Missouri Valley tournament to Drake. Alexander was also heavily involved in the vacancy at Georgia Tech.

What Casey Alexander brings to Kansas State

In Alexander, Kansas State gets a coach with a profile nearly opposite of its last head coach, who had never been a head coach prior to Kansas State. He comes with 15 years of head coaching experience and more than 300 career wins, capped off by a monster 26-win campaign this season that saw Belmont win the Missouri Valley regular-season crown.

He has a reputation as one of the sharpest talent evaluators in the sport, uncovering so many hidden gems in recruiting over the years. Many of those players went on to transfer to some of the biggest programs in the sport, like Will Richard (Florida), Ja’Kobi Gillespie (Maryland and Tennessee), Malik Dia (Ole Miss) and Cade Tyson (North Carolina and Minnesota). At Kansas State, he’ll have the resources to retain many of those stars at Kansas State in a way he couldn’t with Belmont.

Alexander is also considered one of the sharpest offensive minds in the sport, with his Belmont teams ranking in the top 12 nationally in effective field goal percentage in five of his seven seasons. Pairing those coaching chops with the resources at Kansas State’s disposal, a program that has been among the most aggressive in the NIL space over the last two years under Tang, is a move that could well pay off for Taylor.

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