The Sports Corner

Kansas State brings back Bill Snyder

The hardest job for any coach at any level of football is to build a program up from nothing.

It takes more than just than an injection of talent to turn a perennial loser into a winner. It takes a complete change in the culture of the team and fans that support it. If everyone doesn’t believe in the mission of the program, then it will fail.

Bill Snyder took over one of the worst programs in college football that played in an impossibly tough conference and changed it into a powerhouse. After three years off, he is now trying to return Kansas State to the heights that he previously took them too.

The big difference between this time and the first time for Snyder is that it’s a lot easier to return to glory than it is to get there for the first time.

Just ask guys like Pete Carroll, Nick Saban, and Bob Stoops (who was a former Snyder protege at K-State). The programs that those guys took over were all struggling at the time, but quickly made the leap back to their rightful position among college football’s elite.

It’ll be a whole different type of rebuilding job for Snyder. Even though Kansas State has a tradition of winning and has now brought back the coach that won all of those games, they still have a ton of obstacles that they need to overcome to get back to where they were.

For starters, the university is still located in Manhattan, Kansas. Kansas has never been known as a recruiting hot bed for in state football talent and most of that talent gets poached from other teams in the Big 12.

That means that Snyder will have to do it the same way he did it before, with JUCO prospects. No one was better at evaluating Junior College players and developing them than K-State. Every year, dozens of JUCO stars make the leap to Division 1 college football and most of them never live up to the hype. K-State had success because guys like Michael Bishop and Jeff Kelly became impact players after transferring from JUCOs.

It also means that Snyder has to have the resources from the university to keep some of the staff that he develops in Manhattan. The Stoops brothers, Bret Bielema, and Mark Mangino all came from the K-State coaching tree and all left for higher salaries as assistants at other schools before becoming successful head coaches. If Snyder was able to afford to keep some of those guys on his staff, one of them might have been the guy upholding the tradition at K-State right now.

Instead Snyder has been forced to come back to return them to the Big 12 championship game and back into the top ten in the nation.

But he is 69 years old now, so he won’t be around forever. So while a trip back to the top could happen, keeping K-State there could be the real problem. If he is able to keep some rising stars on his staff this time around, then they have a better chance of staying there.

It’s not going to be easy for Bill Snyder in his comeback to college football, but I can guarantee it will be a lot less work this time around to get his program back where it belongs.