Kansas State prefers soft serve.(College Basketball)

The schedule Kansas State will play this season is so soft, you could spread it on your morning bagel. The Wildcats will face every hyphenated institution short of Colgate-Palmolive. Now, if the corner of this page weren't tinted orange and the face accompanying the text not handsomely goateed, you might wonder if you had stumbled onto Matt Hayes' college football column. K-State football coach Bill Snyder is notorious for stuffing his nonconference schedules with teams that take their guaranteed paydays and four-touchdown beatings with a wink and a smile.

This is different. Jim Wooldridge has not yet built K-State basketball into a national power. Should he get there someday, perhaps he will be eager to line up his Wildcats against Kentucky's, Arizona's and Villanova's. But after his three seasons, the program is 14 games under .500, and the current team will feature four freshmen in its rotation. They are promising freshmen, but they eventually will compete in the nation's best conference. If they're going to win at all in the Big 12, they'll first need to understand what winning is like.

Which is where Birmingham-Southern, Gardner-Webb and Bethune-Cookman come in. And why K-State will leave home only three times before league play. And why the average RPI ranking of its nonconference opponents last season was 216.

"In how you gain confidence, there's no way to do it other than to win" Wooldridge says. "There's no guaranteed win on the schedule. Nobody's going to forfeit. We have to play well, we have to play together, but we are at home. And that's an advantage."

One trend that apparently grew from Syracuse's 2003 national championship is the renewed popularity of homebound scheduling by major conference teams. Pittsburgh will not leave its city limits for a nonleague road game. Cincinnati's only preconference road test is at Valparaiso. Auburn will cross the Alabama state line just once before Southeastern Conference play. And the Orangemen will play only one nonleague road game.

The dearth of challenging games hurts fans, but not necessarily teams. It didn't damage Syracuse to play mostly at home against lesser teams last December. Pittsburgh did not have a non-Big East game against a team that wound up in the NCAA Tournament but still wound up with a No. 2 seed.

For Kansas State, however, the motivation to load up on teams from low-major conferences is different. The Wildcats add one of the nation's top recruiting classes to a group of four returning regulars--none of whom was a double figures scorer last year or owns more than a year of Big 12 experience. Sophomore power forward Marques Hayden might mature into a top rebounder, and senior guards Frank Richards, Jarrett Hart and Tim Ellis are OK. But K-State's future is invested in point guard Dez Willingham and small forward Cartier Martin, both of whom appeared on many top 50 recruiting lists.