FROM THE PUBLISHER | Purple encounters

Anyway, it took us about 30 seconds to figure out mutual connections, and for him to ask me if I had any inside information on who the next basketball coach is going to be. He mentioned how he liked our sports editor, Ryan Black. I hated to tell him that Ryan had moved on to a job in Michigan, but anyway I promised to let Ryan know about his fan in the Caribbean.

No, I told the guy. No inside scoop. What was he hearing? What was he thinking?

Whelp, he was well-informed about Underwood’s buyout, and about Frank’s availability, and he said he really liked Bruce Weber, but it was just time for him to go. Small world. Getting smaller.

Which leads me to my second thought.

I don’t know exactly how this is going to turn out, and in the end that’s mostly what matters. But I have to tip the cap to Gene Taylor. The guy walked into a situation where he had to handle the departure of The Great Man Himself as the football coach, and he had to deal with the end of the Bruce Weber era in basketball.

He handled it all with class and dignity. But he also made decisions — very, very difficult decisions — and stuck by them. In both cases, he persuaded the coaches that it was time for them to retire. He gave them their buyout money, which is a tipoff that neither one were voluntary. Bill Snyder, of course, never said a single cross word. Bruce Weber, well, he had a momentary meltdown, and that could have devolved further. But Taylor was classy about all of it, which meant that it escalated no further.

Both could have been godawful, and they weren’t. In the Weber case, the broad consensus among fans I hear from is really warm regard and appreciation. It’s really a best-case scenario, actually — everybody leaves with good will. But had Taylor decided to extend Weber another year (or five), that all would have turned incredibly nasty.

It was the right move at the right time, handled the right way. The Klieman hire is turning out quite well, and I think K-State fans have every reason to think this next move will as well. Of course fan judgment on any of those things varies wildly, determined almost entirely by the result of the last game. The reasonable assessment will take five years.

Which leads me to one last point: By now I think you’d have to tip the cap to John Currie for the hiring of Bruce Weber, although it was much messier from a PR standpoint than the cases I’ve just been discussing. Martin was very popular, and I’ve always thought Weber walked into an impossible situation. But he leaves with two titles — something nobody’s done here since Jack Hartman upwards of a half-century ago — and, as I say, a lot of warm feelings.

These transitions are difficult, messy, expensive, and often counterproductive. These have, by any reasonable standard, been as good as could possibly be expected.