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There are two Division I football games tonight. Both take place in the Sunflower State.
One features the state’s longtime football school, once a BCS National Championship contender and still today a real threat to take the 3-seed in the inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff. They’re welcoming a new conference rival led by a potential top-five NFL Draft pick.
One features the state’s longtime basketball school, one whose last five football coaches before this one averaged a 4–22 record across their respective tenures. They’re welcoming a mid-major known best for producing a few electric basketball teams more than thirty years ago.
Both are…big games?
To be fair, the scope of “big” is different. In the first game we described, the one involving the football school, the winner goes on to make the playoff 41% of the time in our model’s latest simulations. In the second, the one involving the basketball school, the winner makes the playoff 10% of the time. The first game is bigger than the second.
To also be fair, the mid-major visiting the basketball school deserves some credit for making the second game as big as it is. Thanks in part to the CFP’s new one-mid-major minimum, they’re likelier to make the single-elimination bracket than their power conference hosts.
Still, there are two big games in Kansas tonight, and the fact one involves the Jayhawks is still taking some getting used to.
It didn’t always used to be this way.
Between 1960—the first year of the Big Eight Conference—and 1988, the Kansas Jayhawks averaged a record of 4.4 wins, 5.9 losses, and 0.4 ties. They were mediocre. In the years since 1988, they’ve averaged a mark of 4.4 wins, 7.3 losses, and 0.0 ties. Things got worse in the 2010’s, but for the most part, Kansas has always been a 4 or 5-win program. The only thing that changed for Kansas after 1988 was that the season got longer.
Over in Manhattan?
After 1988, everything changed.
From 1960 through 1988, the Kansas State Wildcats averaged 2.6 wins per season against 7.9 losses and 0.1 ties. They won 75 times across 29 years. They went winless in consecutive seasons twice. You thought 4.4 wins was bad!
It was after this second run of consecutive winless years that Kansas State hired Iowa’s offensive coordinator to be their new head coach. The Wildcats hadn’t finished in the top half of the Big Eight since 1982. They hadn’t beaten a ranked opponent since 1981. They hadn’t won a game at all since October 8th, 1986, when Stan Parrish beat the Jayhawks to notch his second and final victory as K-State head coach. After that game, Parrish went two and a half full seasons without winning again. Parrish might not have done a good job in Manhattan, but he wasn’t a bad coach. He’d gone 42–3–1 at Division III Wabash College. He’d led Marshall to its first winning seasons since the plane crash. He went 2–30–1 at Kansas State.
On November 30th, 1988, Kansas State named Bill Snyder its new football coach. Snyder—that offensive coordinator from Iowa—had landed an assistant coaching job under Hayden Fry at North Texas State in 1976. When Fry moved to Iowa City in 1979, Snyder came along. The pair made two Rose Bowls together over the next ten years and finished ranked in the AP’s top 16 six separate times. Coming off two decades of its own misery, Iowa was not a good job for a football coach, but Fry and Snyder made it one. Snyder believed he could do the same in Manhattan.
“The opportunity for the greatest turnaround for college football exists here today.” – Bill Snyder, November 30th 1988
Sports Illustrated ran a story about Snyder in its 1989 college football preview. “There is only one school in the nation that has lost 500 games,” the story—quoting Snyder—began. “This is it, and I get to coach it.”
Coach it, he did. After a 1–10 initial season which came one play away from 0–11, Bill Snyder built the Kansas State Wildcats into a national power. By 1991, they had a winning season. By 1993, they had a bowl win and a season-ending top 25 ranking. By 1995, they’d finished a year inside the top ten and were on their way to eight straight winning campaigns, a period highlighted by K-State’s near-miss at the 1998 national title, which they lost the chance to compete for when they coughed up a 15-point fourth quarter lead to lose the Big 12 Championship to Texas A&M in double overtime. At the end of 1988, there was only one school in the nation that had lost 500 games. At the end of 1998, that school had come a collection of single plays away from competing in the first ever BCS National Championship.
Snyder was a culture changer in Manhattan. He didn’t build Aggieville, and he didn’t mine the limestone which makes up much of K-State’s beautiful small-town campus. He didn’t homestead the farms which led to Kansas State becoming one of the top agricultural schools in America. He didn’t build the basketball program into a well-respected national entity. That all came before him. Kansas State knows a self which existed before Bill Snyder came soaring down the Plains. Nationally, though? Much of what the United States of America knows of Kansas State, we know because of Bill Snyder.
Ahead of Snyder’s first season, he asked an art professor to design a new logo for the football team. The result? The Powercat, the flat, forward-facing, snarling purple silhouette of a wildcat we now expect on the side of those iconic silver helmets. The Powercat took over Kansas State’s identity just as much as Snyder did. By 1997, the school had added two stripes to the side of Willie the Wildcat’s head, so that the mascot—who predated the Powercat by 25 years—could better resemble the Snyder-commissioned logo.
Depending who you ask why Kansas State is traditionally good at football and Kansas is traditionally bad, you might get a raised eyebrow. In Kansas, that 1989 Sports Illustrated article and the history that preceded it is well-known. But to someone outside the state, someone raised in the 90’s or even the 80’s with no big tie to the Little Apple, theories tend to drivel towards KU’s basketball prowess or the ease of recruiting big ol’ farmboys to ag schools. Those theories are incorrect. There is one answer to the question, one reason Kansas State got good and Kansas stayed bad.
Kansas State had Bill Snyder.
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Tonight’s games! What a pair. Starting in Lawrence Kansas City, since it starts first:
(Note: This post previously indicated this game was taking place in Lawrence. It is not. It’s taking place in Kansas City at Children’s Mercy Park, the home of Kansas City’s MLS team.)
Kansas is coming off a tough emotional loss to Illinois. In this new Big 12, a lot of schools have aspirations of becoming the football power, and with Jayhawks dreaming that Lance Leipold could be their Snyder, hopes were high for KU in Jalon Daniels’s eleventh year of college football. (I’m kidding. Daniels is only in his fifth season.) Then, Kansas lost that Illinois game as Daniels threw three picks, the third of which cut short what was shaping up to be a dagger of a drive.
All is not lost for the Jayhawks. They retain a shot at the Big 12 title, and the Big 12 title will likely be accompanied by a playoff berth. Still, college football isn’t used to seeing teams receive multiple mulligans. There’s a “last stand” air to tonight’s contest.
UNLV enters with maybe the most momentum the program’s ever had. Barry Odom didn’t achieve terrible results at Mizzou, but the program was stuck in neutral. In his debut season in Las Vegas, the Rebels revved their engine, winning nine games for only the third time since the program ascended to Division I. (Officially, it was the second time. The 1984 team which won the PCAA—forerunner to the Big West—had to forfeit all eleven of its victories.)
Odom’s Rebels are more respected for their offense than their defense. They allowed 28 points or more in half their games last year, and they allowed 27 two additional times. What has Kansas worried is that UNLV stifled a Houston team two weeks ago who went on to hold its own against Oklahoma. It’s not that UNLV’s defense is necessarily good. It’s that Kansas can’t bank on winning a shootout.
UNLV’s quarterback, Matthew Sluka, was one of the more fun FCS characters these last four years. A red-head from Long Island, Sluka was a decent passer for the Holy Cross Crusaders. Where he shined was in the running game, the facet where he posted back-to-back thousand-yard seasons highlighted by a 213-yard performance against mighty South Dakota State in the 2022 FCS playoffs. Listed at 6’3” and 215 pounds, Sluka can hold his own physically against FBS defenses, especially in the Group of Five. He should also be able to hold his own against Kansas.
The Jayhawks are favored here by just about everyone. Deservedly so. UNLV might have shut down Houston, and their top athletes are on par with KU’s. The problem is that they probably don’t have enough of them to keep up with Kansas’s relative depth and breadth of options. If they win, the Rebels are off and runnin’. With a victory, UNLV rises to 16% playoff-likely, placing it close to the top of the Group of Five playoff chase. More likely, Kansas gets the job done.
In Manhattan:
Similarly hoping to get the job done is Kansas State. I’m not sure they can be sure what they’re up against, though, when it comes to Arizona.
When Jedd Fisch left Tucson, expectations were that he’d bring Noah Fifita and Tetairoa McMillan with him to Washington. Fisch had moved some mountains at Arizona, he had a strong QB coaching pedigree, and the University of Arizona was in some institutional disarray. Still, Fifita and McMillan stayed put, walking onto the floor during a media timeout at an Arizona/UCLA basketball game to announce as much to the Arizona faithful.
The result is that even under first-year coach Brent Brennan, brought in from San Jose State, expectations were moderate for these Wildcats. Some, including the Associated Press, placed them among the Big 12’s preseason favorites. Then, the games started, and Arizona allowed New Mexico to score 39 points before finding themselves trailing at halftime against Northern Arizona, not one of the Big Sky’s best programs. What happened?
One version of the story is that against NAU, Arizona was intentionally looking to spread the ball around, with Fifita going so far as to publicly apologize for leaning so heavily on his star wideout against UNM. McMillan hauled in four touchdowns in that game and racked up 304 receiving yards. It was a sight. This story goes that Arizona didn’t throw much to McMillan against the Lumberjacks by choice, that they played the game with some self-imposed ankle weights in order to strengthen the rest of the offensive body. The story goes that the defense locked in, that the offense was explicable, and that Arizona is fine.
Another version is that Arizona’s in trouble. Their defense struggled to stop the Lobos, and NAU of all teams shut down the Fifita/McMillan connection. “The desert sky is falling!” That sort of thing.
Most likely, Arizona’s just a little inconsistent. Talented, flawed, and inconsistent. Who among us.
Kansas State knows the inconsistency problem well. Two years ago, K-State preemptively torpedoed what would become a Big 12 championship season by losing at home in September to Tulane. Last year, they lost early in the year to Mizzou, then repeated the performance (but worse) against Oklahoma State on a Friday night in Stillwater. This time, the late-season rally wasn’t enough, with their near-upset of Texas in Austin coupling with a mauling by Iowa State’s offensive line to leave the Wildcats tied for fourth in the league.
Kansas State is back, though, and they’re back as a Big 12 favorite. Some—our model included—have them as the Big 12 favorite. Sophomore quarterback Avery Johnson, a Wichita kid, is an athlete and a half, and Chris Klieman’s teams are generally strong in the trenches, a trend which goes back to his time building North Dakota State to its peak in the late 2010’s. The 247Sports Talent Composite gives Arizona’s roster a narrow edge, but while that ranking is useful in parsing national championship contenders, you can win a Big 12 title through development and development alone. Kansas State just did that two years ago, with Texas and Oklahoma still in the league. Look for the K-State running backs—DJ Giddens and Dylan Edwards—to get the ball in their hands a lot, and for offensive coordinator Conor Riley (no relation to Lincoln & Garrett, and rather different in style) to use some pre-snap motion in an attempt to make Arizona look as lost defensively as it looked against UNM.
It’s important to note that despite this game featuring two Big 12 teams, this is not a Big 12 game. It was on the schedule before the new Big 12 was constructed, one of a number of such games that are remaining but don’t affect Big 12 play. There’s a chance it could become relevant in Big 12 tiebreaker scenarios—I haven’t seen anything from the conference clearing this piece up—but most likely, it’s just a big nonconference game for two teams who happen to play in the same conference.
Still, it’s a big nonconference game. With a win, K-State rises to 45% likely to make the playoff. With a big win, K-State likely becomes the Big 12 favorite even in betting markets. For Arizona, that playoff number becomes 33% with an upset victory, and the Wildcats would certainly earn mention among Utah, Oklahoma State, and the other Wildcats at the front of the Big 12 race.
It’s Friday night in the Sunflower State. As always, Bill Snyder’s legacy hangs over it all.
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We got a little too optimistic earlier this week when we talked about the blog posts coming yesterday and today. Here are some resources for this weekend, and notes on what should be here later today or sometime tomorrow morning:
- Our Week 3 Preview
- Our model’s latest College Football Playoff Bracketology
- Movelor’s picks for the Week 3 games
- Yesterday’s examination of whom else the Pac-12 might add
- Yesterday’s college football futures, with a theory of this year’s Heisman race
- Yesterday’s look at the Group of Five’s best playoff contenders
- This morning’s Cyclone State, with some numbers on Iowa State’s backloaded conference schedule
In addition to these, we’ll have more college football picks for tonight and tomorrow, plus: Good Things Shrewing from Stuart McGrath on Notre Dame’s matchup with Purdue; and BFN from NIT Stu on Texas’s visit from UTSA. Tomorrow morning, we were going to talk about Oregon State and Washington State’s conference status, but they preempted that plan. I think we’ll pivot to outlining a few different versions of just how good Georgia can be. Thanks for bearing with us as we continue to get our C(FB) legs.
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