19 Days To K-State Football: Bill Snyder’s Hiring Was 19 Years In The Making

Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports

I’m currently basking next to the water some in New York’s Finger Lakes region and may or may not know where I am after sampling the most fabulous wine country the East Coast has to offer, but that doesn’t mean the countdown is taking a day off! Hopefully WordPress is cooperating in automatically posting these over the next few days and updating the Twitter account (I’ll check when I get back). But you’re not here to read about my vacation – it’s the football you’re after. As such, with 19 days until kick-off against North Dakota State we look at the 19 years preceding the greatest hiring in college football.

Note: I’m taking a break from the player previews we’ve recently conducted, although for the curious there were two players listed at #19 on K-State’s spring roster. Kody Cook is a transfer quarterback/athlete we previewed earlier this year and you can read about him here. Riley Galyon is a freshman from Sterling, KS with little information out there, but his basic numbers are here. However, today we’re looking at the events leading up to Bill Snyder’s hiring.

I’m claiming Snyder’s journey to K-State in 1988 began in 1969, and it’s an intriguing backstory if you don’t know about the program four decades ago. In October 1970 The Big 8 commissioner hit K-State with a set of sanctions for recruiting violations in 1969 – an event that reversed the fortunes of an otherwise improving Wildcat team. In fact, head coach Vince Gibson was named the pre-season national coach of the year by Playboy Magazine in ’70. Albeit the team did finish second in the conference while defeating Oklahoma and eighth-ranked Colorado, a blow-out loss to Nebraska to close out the season with a league title up for grabs dampened what were high preason expectations. That was the era of Lynn Dickey – one of the program’s best quarterbacks ever.

Even more frustrating were the three years of probation dealt to the program that season, which included a one-year ban from bowl game participation and from live television. That was Gibson’s last winning season at the school, and he left in 1974 under bitter circumstances. Gibson was adamant that the sanctions destroyed the rebuilding effort he’d undertaken, and were a product of a feud with KU coach Pepper Rodgers – not any sort of real violations.

Gibson returned to Manhattan in 2000 to be inducted into K-State’s Athletic Hall of Fame, and discussed the issue again saying “It just ruined us. It destroyed us. And I look back at it now and remember spending a lot of bitter years over that, because I thought (Big 8 Commissioner) Wayne Duke had really stuck it to us, and I still feel that way.” He lamented that the rivalry for players with Rodgers led both coaches to turn the other program in for anything.

"“We’d turn each other in for making the wrong turn at a street light… we didn’t give kids a dime. They got us for tiny things everybody else was doing, but what they really got us for was a kid named Vince O’Neil, who ended up at KU. They’re the ones that wheeled and dealed… Looking back on it, it was Pepper and I fighting and immaturity on our part. We fought like cats and dogs. We hated each other. It was silly. We should have got along. I remember (Nebraska coach) Bob Devaney’s attitude was, ‘You guys do your thing, just leave me alone.’ “"

It was certainly a different era of college football, and I can’t imagine the Big 12 policing its members rather than the NCAA in 2013. However, the University was whacked again eight years later with a set of sanctions even more damaging. Thanks to the magic of Google News, I found the May 28, 1978 edition of the Eugene Register-Guard newspaper and its account of the proceedings, leading off with the article with the following paragraph:

"The Big Eight Conference has jolted lowly Kansas State with a four-part penalty believed to be the toughest ever slapped on a major college football program."

Among the stipulations at the time were:

• Indefinite probation in football in which the program could not participate in a bowl game or on television.
• Initial reduction of scholarships by 13, followed by four the next year and an additional three the year after that.
• The school’s Big Eight revenue was cut by a third “in lieu of the possible loss of scheduling privileges against other Big Eight Teams.”

This time the school had less of a leg to stand on – it had handed out additional scholarships and was in violation of financial aid rules. Still, the punishment was brutal. With one of the conference’s smallest athletic budgets at $2.2 million (and only a portion of that for football), the school lost $125,000 per year over the course of the punishment. In the course of discussing K-State’s punishment, the 1970 probation weighed heavily as the school was viewed as a repeat offender.

K-State’s defense of their actions was both questionable and understandable. Head coach Ellis Rainsberger was fired in November 1977 for signing too many players, but the school was caught between a rock and a hard spot – do you revoke the scholarships for 13 players to get under the limit after promising financial aid?

A recitation of the following years for the program is painful but necessary. Stripped of scholarships and hampered in recruiting, K-State’s 6-5 record in 1970 was the first winning season in 15 years and the school had won two straight against the Sooners. However, the Wildcats would go on to enjoy just one more winning season before Bill Snyder arrived on campus – a 6-5-1 campaign in 1982 sandwiched between a 2-9 record in 1981 and 3-8 record in 1983. By 1989, K-State became the first D-I program to lose 500 games. However, that was also the year Iowa’s offensive coordinator, Bill Snyder, first stepped on to the field to replace Stan Parrish as head coach (though he was technically hired at the end of the 1988 season).

If K-State was satisfied with the performance of the football program, would the school have gone after Bill Snyder? Between Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Colorado, the Big Eight was one of the most brutal conferences in the nation and even being competitive would have left the fan base content given the history of the mid-century. But wasn’t the case at all – K-State had not won a game since October 1986 when Snyder was hired, going 0-26-1 in that time, including the infamous 1987 Toilet Bowl. The state of the program was put in motion by two sets of sanctions in the 1970s that just perpetuated themselves throughout the 80s.

“In ’69 and ’70, we could play with anyone in the country,” Gibson said during his induction to K-State’s Athletic Hall of Fame. Vince Gibson passed away January 10 last year, but I’m sure he left happy to see K-State once again able to play with anyone in the country. It took 19 years to bring in the coach to do it.