Tag: kansas state

Kansas State football’s 20 best wins of the last decade

Okay, let’s do this.

The Kansas State football team has had a number of big wins over the past decade. The two-year run in 2011 and 2012 could have filled an entire list by itself. But the program’s success extends beyond those two seasons. And every player who contributed to the program deserves recognition in some way.

So with that in mind, I established a couple of ground rules in putting together a best wins of the decade countdown. Firstly, I figured it would be fairest to all individuals to make sure every single KSU team of the decade was represented. To do that effectively, there was no way I could limit this list to 10 or even 15. So 20 was the number I settled on.

I also wanted every Big 12 opponent K-State defeated to appear on the list and a range of non-conference opponents too. The only exception to this rule here is Missouri, which barely missed the cut as being a part of an ugly-as-sin game and only sharing the conference with KSU for two seasons. Hey, it was satisfying as heck to send them out with a loss, but the concession needed to be made to make room for everything else. Consider that game our honorable mention.

And with that, we can get rolling. Here is my take on K-State’s 20 best wins of the decade.

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The optimistic vs. pessimistic take on 2018 Kansas State football

Ah, Kansas State football.  Coming off a disappointing 2015 season full of injuries and disaster (when your wide receiver is taking snaps at quarterback, it’s a disaster), the program rallied around the athleticism and game management of quarterback Jesse Ertz to rebound to 9 wins in 2016. Naturally, Ertz went down to injury in 2017* to take away all of that positive momentum.  Playing a pair of young kids at quarterback transformed consistent performance into wild highs (such as crazy comebacks against ISU/Texas Tech and a win in Stillwater against a Top 15 OSU) and wild lows (KU and TCU … though in fairness the lowest of lows came with Ertz still in the lineup vs. Vanderbilt).  The end result was a somewhat disappointing 8 wins.

* Hmm, maybe all these quarterback injuries indicate a need for a re-evaluation of an offensive game plan that regularly calls for your quarterback to carry the ball 20 times a game.

In the offseason, Kansas State has suffered massive player and coaching defections, creating even more instability.

So what now?

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Big 12 Expansion Makes Sense: Here’s Why…

Trying to read the tea leaves and interpret/predict Big 12 expansion is mostly pointless in principle, because one is most assuredly going to be wrong.  And not just wrong, but often times spectacularly wrong.

Since I have no fear of being spectacularly wrong, you’re in luck!  You’ve come to the right place to read a few words on the subject.

First off, a primer.  That link should give you some decent insight.  And this one.  And maybe this one too.  If you don’t want to read all that, the short version recap is this:  The Big 12 is a conference that suffers a fragile ego, due in large part to its having been raided by other leagues earlier this decade.  Stuck at 10 teams and stuck with a TV contract that is by no means terrible but which still lags behind that of its competition (in particular, fellow “major” conferences Big 10 and SEC), several schools in the conference are seemingly unhappy and pushing for expansion.  Or maybe they’re just sort of mildly concerned.  Or maybe this is all an act and we don’t know.

This is the part of the process that I think confuses people the most:  They can’t predict what the institutions will do, and they can’t do that because each institution is subject to the whims of multiple individual people.  Presidents.  Boards of directors.  Powerful boosters.  Athletic directors and coaches (not really, but it’s best to be polite and include them anyway).  The point being, what if one of these people has a louder voice than the others?  What if said person is having a bad day?  Or is just a generally irrational person?  And what if the media and common layman can’t predict who might wield the most influence, what they might think on a given day, or even what they might think today?

You’d be served up a nice helping of “fuck if I know” ice cream, which is what all the reporting on this topic reveals.  The best one can do is try to approach this from a logical vantage point and guess at the things that seem to make sense.  That doesn’t mean the key figures in this play will act rationally at the end of the day, but it does give the observer a better understanding of perhaps what *should* happen.

And thusly, I’ve written well over 300 words without getting around to talking about expansion, which is what this article is supposed to be about.

Continue reading Big 12 Expansion Makes Sense: Here’s Why…