Chris Klieman
Now
Career arc
Bowls and playoffs: 3-2
2019Liberty BowlL 17-20
2021Texas BowlW 42-20
2022Sugar BowlL 20-45
2023Pop-Tarts BowlW 28-19
2024Rate BowlW 44-41
Report card
Defense carries it: 75th percentile defense, above the median offense at 62nd.
Kansas State, every completed season graded against the whole field, then averaged.
Offense
Defense
Each season is his team’s percentile among every team with that stat (the share it beat), averaged over his completed seasons here; a mid-season takeover year and the season in progress aren’t graded. Letters: A+ 90th percentile and up, A 80, B+ 70, B 60, B− 50, C+ 45, C 40, C− 30, D 15, F below.
Fans
No fan talk about him on our list yet. His record is on Career.
Stats
Big games
The big-game ledger
How he does in the games that matter most — rivalry record, performance broken out by real opponent tier, one-score games, and his toughest historical matchup.
7-0 against his rivals. Winless in 3 tries against Steve Sarkisian.
ATS is his record against the spread: did his team beat the closing betting line, winning by more than it or losing by less? Lines start in 2013; a dash means fewer than 6 of those games had one. One-score games carry no spread record: a big favorite that wins a close game has almost always failed to cover, so that number would say nothing about the coach.
Signature games
Tags describe each game; they aren’t scores. The weighting that picks these games is still being tested.
How he plays
Run/pass mix, by field position
Ran more than the situation called for under Messingham.
5,612 run and pass snaps at Kansas State, 2019–2025, his own games, one row per offensive coordinator. Each cell is how much more often he passed than the rest of FBS did in the same situation (field zone, down, distance, score, quarter, same season), in percentage points.
Pass rate, stint by stint
Where each stint’s offense sat between run-first and pass-first, and how far it moved from one season to the next, against the FBS-wide average of 41% pass. The band is that stint’s real season-to-season range, not a fixed-width box.
Season-to-season pass-rate range for all 449 FBS coaching stints with at least three covered seasons, 2004–2025.
Building the roster
Five numbers on how he actually stocks a roster, from signing day to draft day.
His recruiting, really
His 6 ranked Kansas State classes of his own have averaged #49 nationally — best #33, worst #63.
His class — he had the full signing cycleTransition — he was hired mid-cycle
Rank is each signing class’s national recruiting rank (#1 is best). Only a class he had a full signing cycle to build counts as his; inherited and mid-transition classes still show here, faded, but stay out of the average.
Roster ownership
Roster ownership
of his 2025 roster arrived on his watch — 110 of 110 players. Nobody is left from before he was hired.
Of his own players on this roster, 14% came through the transfer portal; the rest are non-portal arrivals (high-school signees, JUCO transfers, walk-ons).
This tenure spans the 2021 transfer-portal tracking floor: seasons before 2021 structurally cannot be classified portal-vs-not (they land in 'unknown' below), so the portal-share figure understates how many pre-2021 arrivals might have been transfers under the pre-portal-tracking transfer rules.
18% of his 174 new players since 2022 came through the portal (FBS programs, same seasons: 22%). His share was 11% in 2022 and 30% in 2025.
Graded on the players who arrived and the players who left together, his portal seasons came out worse than most FBS programs’ in 1 of the 4 seasons graded. our read
Each player counts once, in the season he arrived. 2021, the first season of portal tracking here, is left off because its arrival records look incomplete (about 31 new players per FBS team, against 52 in 2022). Portal grade: the site’s position-value-weighted scoring (the same engine as the Portal Heat feed and the “Who won the portal” grade): the value of the players who came in minus the value of the ones who left, ranked against every FBS program’s grade that same season. A season with fewer than 4 transfers in and out is not graded.
“His own” means the player arrived while he was head coach; “inherited” means a predecessor brought him in.
Size up front
Size up front
Offensive linemen on his Kansas State rosters have averaged within a few pounds of the FBS average (2019–2025). In the three seasons before he arrived, Kansas State’s line averaged within a few pounds of the FBS average.
Average listed weight of every offensive lineman on each season’s roster, holdovers included, against every FBS roster that season (2010 on; a program needs 3+ seasons under him to appear). Weights are the ones programs publish, and programs list differently. This describes size only — not scheme, and not quality.
Where he recruits
is his biggest recruiting state: 43 of 148 signees (29%) across his 2019–2025 tenure, drawn from 28 states in all. Next: TX (27).
45% of his signees come from KS and its 4 border states (MO 12, CO 6, NE 3, OK 3).
Off this map: 11 signees to the west (AZ 5, CA 4, others) and 1 to the east (NY).
- median hometown distance
- 346 mi
- within 100 mi
- 11%
- within 500 mi
- 68%
- beyond 1,000 mi
- 13%
The map counts signed recruits across his tenure; the distance figures cover his current roster, transfers and walk-ons included. Two different groups, kept separate on purpose.
The NFL pipeline
The NFL pipeline
players drafted into the NFL off his teams here. He brought in 13 of them himself; 2 arrived under Bill Snyder. 1 went in the first round.
| Year | Pick | Player | Pos | NFL team | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | R5.04 | Sam Hecht | Center |  Carolina Panthers | |
| 2026 | R7.12 | VJ Payne | Safety |  New York Jets | |
| 2025 | R3.20 | Jacob Parrish | Cornerback |  Tampa Bay Buccaneers | |
| 2025 | R5.14 | DJ Giddens | Running Back |  Indianapolis Colts | |
| 2025 | R5.24 | Marques Sigle | Safety |  San Francisco 49ers | |
| 2024 | R2.21 | Ben Sinnott | Tight End |  Washington Commanders | |
| 2024 | R3.09 | Cooper Beebe | Offensive Guard |  Dallas Cowboys | |
| 2024 | R7.34 | KT Leveston | Offensive Guard |  Los Angeles Rams |
| Year | Pick | Player | Pos | NFL team | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | R1.32 | Felix Anudike-Uzomah | Defensive End |  Kansas City Chiefs | |
| 2023 | R2.13 | Julius Brents | Cornerback | Indianapolis Colts | |
| 2023 | R6.04 | Josh Hayes | Cornerback | Tampa Bay Buccaneers | |
| 2023 | R6.35 | Deuce Vaughn | Running Back | Dallas Cowboys | |
| 2022 | R7.26 | Skylar Thompson | Quarterback |  Miami Dolphins | recruited under Bill Snyder |
| 2022 | R7.32 | Russ Yeast | Safety | Los Angeles Rams | |
| 2021 | R7.07 | Wyatt Hubert | Defensive End |  Cincinnati Bengals | recruited under Bill Snyder |
A pick counts toward his tenure when the player’s final college season was one he coached, a checkable rule rather than a claim about who developed the player. A blank note means the player is on a verified roster and arrived on his watch. “Estimated” means no roster record, so the final season is assumed to be the year before the draft.
News
No outlet on our list has written about him by name yet. His record is on Career.
Career
Coaching career
The arc of his career is on Now.
Steady no large move in either direction on our stature ladder
3rd-best Kansas State tenure of 18 by the numbers.
Followed Bill Snyder (2009–2018) · succeeded by Collin Klein (2026–now).
| Season | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | ||||||||
| Record | 8-5 | 4-6 | 8-5 | 10-4 | 9-4 | 9-4 | 6-6 | |
| Postseason | L bowl | — | W bowl | L bowl | W bowl | W bowl | — | |
| Coordinators | ||||||||
| OC | Courtney Messingham | Courtney Messingham | Courtney Messingham | Collin Klein | Collin Klein | Matt Wells / Conor Riley | Matt Wells | |
| DC | Scottie Hazelton | Joe Klanderman | Joe Klanderman | Joe Klanderman | Joe Klanderman | Joe Klanderman | Joe Klanderman | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | ||||||||
| Offense | 34 | 36 | 89 | 74 | 79 | 87 | 76 | |
| Defense | 37 | 15 | 30 | 53 | 39 | 79 | 67 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | ||||||||
| 1st-down pass% | 30.3 | 33.9 | 36.6 | 37.7 | 44.2 | 44.3 | 40.8 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 35.6 | 33.7 | 34.0 | 39.1 | 36.1 | 44.1 | 33.3 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 23.7 | 17.9 | 41.9 | 46.2 | 50.0 | 43.2 | 50.0 | |
Outperforms his recruiting talent on offense and performs about as expected for his recruiting talent on defense.
Brings in bigger-than-position-typical players than most.
Recruits older, more experienced transfers than most.
5 player-seasons honored (All-America / national award): Deuce Vaughn (2021), Deuce Vaughn (2022), Felix Anudike-Uzomah (2022), Cooper Beebe (2022), Cooper Beebe (2023)
AI Narratives — “Kansas State's offseason losses create pressure points” and 4 more on the team page.
All-time wins
Wins at programs this site tracks, 1936–present — one consistent count for every coach, not each program’s own historically reported total.
2nd all-time at Kansas State
Was he good?
The data leans positive, where the data can separate from zero: every conclusive reading points the same way.
+3.9 pts at Kansas State · #440 of 1290 · middle halfModel fit as of 2026-09-04.