Bill Snyder director's cut
The Kansas City Star
I’m still trying to wrap my brain around the fact that K-State was picked sixth in the Big 12 preseason, and is now ranked third in the BCS rankings with a plausible path to the national championship.
It might take a while.
Anyway, in addition to an excuse for linking one more time to last week’s column on the amazing Bill Snyder saving Manhattan twice, I wanted to include some things that didn’t make the column.
I asked Arthur Brown if he ever heard Snyder cuss out a teammate: “I’ve heard him say ass a couple times, but I’ve never heard anything call out or anything like that.”
Mark Mangino won all three games against K-State while Snyder was retired, and by an average of almost 20 points. How long ago does that seem?
Jim Colbert — the former pro golfer, K-State defensive back, and Snyder friend — says Snyder actually looks younger now than when he was retired. “He kind of looks at me funny when I tell him that, but it’s true.”
Only ten of the team’s 28 seniors signed with K-State out of high school. DeMarcus Robinson, a 5-foot-6 sophomore from Wichita, is the only player on the roster to sign out of high school with as much as a four-star rating from Rivals.Com.
Most everyone I talked to seemed to agree that Snyder came back initially to “calm the waters,” as he said, but that the motivation changed at some point when the competitive juices started coming again. It’s like old times now, and nobody — not even Snyder — has an idea how much longer he’ll do it.
The best line from that famous Sports Illustrated article calling K-State the worst program in the country came from Will Cokeley: “The problem is every time we think we’re good we remember we’re K-State.”
Jon Wefald was the KSU president at the time. He described the article like this: “It was a bunch of stuff saying how bad we were, and then at the end it sort of said, ‘But they have a decent debate team.’ And it was all true.”
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