Kansas State

The Kansas State story is a specific kind of American story: the one where patience is the strategy. Snyder arrived in 1989 at a program that had won two conference games in the previous decade and built it, brick by brick, into Big 12 champions twice. The stadium bears his name. The statue outside it does too. The creed is EMAW — Every Man A Wildcat — and it means something in Manhattan that it doesn't mean as a slogan anywhere else, because the Wildcats earned it the slow way.

The 2025 season tested the faith. K-State opened ranked No. 17, then went 6-6, declined a bowl bid amid injuries and portal attrition, and watched Chris Klieman retire after the regular season — the program's first bowl-less year since 2020. The patient faction read it as a stumble. The doubting faction heard the old line again: that the program is Snyder's, that without one coach it reverts. Then Kansas State hired Collin Klein — the 2012 Big 12 title team's Heisman finalist, a former Wildcat QB who left Texas A&M to come home — and the bloodline-continues theory reasserted itself. Star QB Avery Johnson returns for 2026.

The 2026 season is Klein's opening argument. The program's Big 12 title drought goes back to 2012, and a 6-6 year made the case for the doubters. Klein's case is the same one Snyder always made: Manhattan builds what it builds, out-lasts what it out-lasts, and the patience pays off. The fanbase has believed that long enough that it's structural. The question is whether one of their own, inheriting the program at its lowest recent point, can make the argument stick.

Kansas State is 3-2 and 0-2 in the Big 12 in Klein's first year. After wins by 68, 27 and 11 points over Nicholls, Washington State and Tulane, it lost 31-26 at Cincinnati on September 26 as 6-point favorites, then 35-16 at home to Houston on October 10.