The 2018 Kansas State football season was one of the most bizarre and baffling I’ve ever seen. In this fairly rambling post where I was obviously still trying to work out what exactly was going wrong with Bill Snyder’s formula you can see me probing at some of the underlying issues. The big one was … [Read more…]
Some of these breakdowns will include single teams, others will pack together multiple squads. I intended for every post to be the latter but the Jayhawk posted ended up longer than expected. Building a Big 12 contender from the Midwest is something that has rarely coincided with using “space force” tactics. Mark Mangino got the … [Read more…]
Bill Snyder’s teams were designed to win football games in a particular fashion. He built something akin to a powerhouse HS team, fielding maxed out seniors at most positions and bringing a level of discipline and precision to bear that other teams couldn’t overcome with superior talent. The team that Chris Klieman inherited for 2019 … [Read more…]
Since I coined the term “inverted Tampa 2” to describe Iowa State’s defense I’ve been getting questions regularly on how this newfangled anti-spread scheme works. Particularly since Baylor essentially stole it and made it a major part of their package while turning their bust-prone defense into a unit that paved the way for an 11-1 … [Read more…]
That was it, the last week of regular season Big 12 football for the 2019 season. It was an interesting year, we’ll recap it in a variety of ways over the coming weeks including with my All-B12 thoughts and some breakdowns of Baylor v Oklahoma round II. The final weekend spelled out well some of … [Read more…]
The weekend slate before the Red River Shootout is often a strange and overlooked one within the Big 12 conference. Even though Texas has been truly good in only one of the years since the exodus of Nebraska, Colorado, Missouri, and Texas A&M, it was clear when that happened that things were shaping up to … [Read more…]
Klieman’s Wildcats have a few players on defense that could potentially make for an unexpectedly strong group in 2019. This defense was one of the league’s best at the start of the decade with S&P+ top 25 units in 2012 and 2013 and then still another solid group in 2014 that finished 42nd. Then some … [Read more…]
I noticed this very interesting tweet recently from @GPCWallace about Klieman’s first real recruiting class at K-State: As a contrarIan, my initial reaction was, “well congratulations. K-State has loaded up on their normal allotment of 22 3-stars before the rest of the non-Texas/OU has done so. Big deal.” But there’s a lot more to recruiting … [Read more…]
I took the chance to watch the press conferences from Kansas State’s new offensive and defensive coordinators, Courtney Messingham and Scottie Hazelton as well as some of the players that were made available. There was a lot to glean from their occasionally frank appraisal of the roster and the league. The big picture standpoint While … [Read more…]
I’d been tracking Chris Klieman at North Dakota State for several years before he become the head coach at K-State. You can read some thoughts on his systems and how it all might translate to K-State in this article over at Football Study Hall. In short, he built some bruising teams up north in Fargo that dominated FCS competition with … [Read more…]