Omaha, Neb. ? One team is the youngest in the tournament and has a first-year head coach. The other has a veteran coach, who invented the offense his team uses, and a tall, veteran team.

The young team has the most talented player in the NBA Draft. The veteran team has mostly players who will draw the interest of European teams.

No. 3 seed Wisconsin and No. 11 seed Kansas State offer as much of a contrasting-styles matchup as there is in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. (Tipoff at Qwest Center is scheduled for 3:20 p.m. today.)

Even though no team in the Big 12 runs an offense called “the swing,” favored by Wisconsin’s Bo Ryan, Wildcats coach Frank Martin sounded confident his team would be up for the challenge.

Asked if his team had faced any big men that remind him of Wisconsin’s deep stable of near-7-footers, Martin said: “Texas A&M ring a bell? Kansas ring a bell? That’s the great thing about the Big 12. Great thing. Some conferences, everybody plays real similar. The Big 12, there’s so many contrasting styles. You’ve got Sasha Kaun and … I keep calling him (Joel) Przybilla. I keep getting it confused because he’s from Minnesota. Their back-up center. … Cole Aldrich. They’ve got guys like that who are physical and very long and difficult to score over. You’ve got A&M, which has big, strong guys who don’t like playing on the perimeter.

“You want to play a grind-it-out, as-physical-as-it-comes basketball game, you play that when you play Nebraska. If you want to play against a team that’s got a combination of shooters and low-post guys, you’ve got that when you play Texas A&M. And you’ve got it when you play Oklahoma. If you want to go play a team that runs and ball-screens and rebounds it, you’ve got it in Kansas. And the same with Texas. All the different kinds of styles of play prepares you for the postseason.”

In defeating USC in the opening round of the tournament Thursday night, K-State looked like a team that had grown up just in time.

“We’re not 30-year-old men with wives and kids to feed,” said K-State freshman Michael Beasley, the projected first pick in the NBA Draft. “We were all at our senior prom last year. So I think we grew over the course of the season.”