You couldn't see Martin coming, but he certainly arrived

SALT LAKE CITY -- Could Frank Martin do this? Could he coach Kansas State to the NCAA tournament, to a No. 2 seed, to the Sweet 16? No. He couldn't. And in 2007, when Martin landed the KSU job, just about everybody was in agreement on that point.

In hindsight, though, we should have seen Frank Martin coming. Yeah, we. You and me, emphasis on me, because I was in Cincinnati when Martin was a UC assistant under Bob Huggins. I knew Frank Martin, but I didn't see him coming. Neither did most people.

When he was promoted to head coach at Kansas State, he was promoted because Kansas State had the best recruit in the country, Michael Beasley, and Beasley wasn't coming to Manhattan, Kan., unless his buddy, assistant Dalonte Hill, was still there. Hill was just a few years removed from college himself, so no way was he ready. Martin was the only other plausible choice, so he got the job and Hill stayed around. And Beasley came. And people said mean things about the whole arrangement.

"I saw what people were writing, and I got a kick out of it back then -- because if you can't recruit high-level players, then you shouldn't have a head job at a BCS-level school," Martin says. "People said he got the job because of that? Well, yeah -- you're absolutely right. [Beasley] was part of it. But I knew I was ready. I knew."

That makes one of us. I didn't know, but I should have. I can see it now -- the signs I missed and the background I didn't understand. Looking back, sure, I see it. Frank Martin was that subtle gust of wind in the distance. Most people can feel the breeze, nothing more. But if you knew what you were looking at, you would have recognized that gust as the coming of the storm of the century.

Martin had coached more than a decade on the high school level in Miami, 30 or 40 school games a year and maybe 100 more games every spring and summer. There's a million different paths to become a college head coach, and Martin took that less glamorous route. He wasn't a star player at a big program, handed an assistant's job at his alma mater before getting the chance to run his own program. That was Quin Snyder, but it wasn't Frank Martin. By the time he got his chance at Kansas State, Martin had coached something like 1,500 games. Were they high-level college games? No. Of course not. But the sport's the same. The strategy is the same. The actions and reactions, adjustments and readjustments, are similar.

But I missed that connection. I had no idea Martin could do this -- none -- and I knew the guy fairly well. Went to tons of Cincinnati home games, spent time with Martin on the summer recruiting scene, even ate several meals with Martin and Andy Kennedy, another Cincinnati assistant coach under Huggins.

Kennedy was a rising star in the profession. Any idiot could see that, me included. Today, Kennedy is in his fourth season at Ole Miss. That's a place where 20 wins is a landmark achievement, and Kennedy has reached 20 wins three times in his four years, and at the moment he has the 24-10 Rebels in the NIT semifinals. He's a star now. He was a star then. Him, I saw coming.

Frank Martin? Nope. At Cincinnati, Huggins handled most of the coaching on the sideline, and Kennedy picked up whatever was left over. Martin sat there quietly. That's what I knew about Martin as a college coach -- that he sits there quietly.

Today everyone knows what kind of coach Martin is, and it's not the kind who sits there quietly. Even President Obama, busy as he's been in recent months on health insurance, knows what kind of man Martin is on the sideline. "He's a scary dude," Obama told ESPN.

Martin is a fire-breathing dragon now, but a few years ago he was this soft-spoken, gentle creature. So I asked Andy Kennedy on Wednesday, hours after Ole Miss had beaten Texas Tech in the NIT quarterfinals, where the dragon had come from.

"Oh, it was there. It was always there," Kennedy told me. "But you have to remember, we were coaching with Hugs, and Hugs is the biggest dragon in the moat. There's no room for an assistant to be throwing any fire. But Frank's a lot like Hugs. You know Hugs -- off the court, he's a low-talker. Hell, you can barely hear him. That's Frank, too."

That said, Kennedy says he saw this coming. Frank Martin, legitimate head coach? Sure. Kennedy saw it.

Martin has a presence on the sideline and in the national spotlight, where he is finally being recognized. (Getty Images)

"I did. I did see it coming," Kennedy says. "Frank just has this presence about him. Either you have it or you don't, and he always had it. He's connected to Miami, and he has Dalonte with those connections to Washington D.C., so they're going to get some players, and we all know how important that is. And you look at his teams, and they play so hard for him because they like the guy."

He's real. That's why they like Martin. When Kansas State gave Martin a contract extension earlier this month, signing him through 2015 for $1.55 million a season, the school held a press conference to announce the news. Athletics director John Currie made the announcement, then turned over the microphone to Martin, who just sat there.

And sat there.

And sat there.

More than 30 seconds passed -- I'm getting goosebumps typing this, right now -- as Martin sat there, trying not to cry. He was stunned. He was honored. He was the son of Cuban immigrants. He grew up poor. He had fallen in love with basketball early in high school, but he wasn't good enough to play for his high school team. He didn't even make the roster. He just floated around the periphery, doing odd jobs for the coach, anything to be close to the game. When he got his first coaching job, he was handed a whistle and told to coach the junior varsity.

That's humble. After 15 years at various high schools, Martin joined the staff at Northeastern, where he spent his first year in town sleeping on a cot in another staffer's home.

"You're talking about a lifer," Kennedy says. "He's a guy that young coaches in the business aspire to be. He's earned everything he's gotten."

When he got his big break at Kansas State, taking over Beasley and Co., Martin went 21-12 and reached the 2008 NCAA tournament. Beasley was the best player in America, but then he was gone. The next season, without Beasley, Kansas State went 22-12. Not bad, but no NCAA Tournament. The Wildcats went to the 2009 NIT instead. Here came the fall, right? Well, no. Here came the turning point. Kansas State went 26-7 this season, got that No. 2 seed, then won two more games in the NCAA tournament.

The Wildcats play Xavier on Thursday in the Sweet 16. Kansas State is good enough to beat Xavier, and then whoever's awaiting in the West Regional title game on Saturday. Kansas State is good enough to win the next four games, and Michael Beasley has been gone for two years. This isn't Beasley's team, or Beasley's program. It belongs to Frank Martin, the scariest coach in America.

But he's not. Not really. No matter how it looks. In the second round against BYU, cameras caught Martin cursing junior guard Jacob Pullen up one side and down the other. It looked shocking, harsh, even mean. It looked like something out of Bob Knight 101, but it wasn't. See, Knight's players feared him. Martin's players like him. After the BYU game, Pullen said all sorts of nice things about Martin, but the most telling thing was this: Pullen referred to his coach as "Frank."

"I don't need people calling me 'Coach' to make it sound like I'm the head coach," Martin said. "I am the head coach. They know it, I know it. We're in this together, but when I say the final word, they know it's the final word. It doesn't matter what anyone calls me."

Well, it should. Because everyone is now calling Frank Martin the Big 12 coach of the year.