There's Never Been A More-Deserving Inductee Than Snyder
Posted
Mark Howe-mhowe@timesuniononline.com
How in the world did it take this long to get Kansas State head football coach Bill Snyder into the College Football Hall Of Fame? If there’s any doubt about the impact Snyder has had not just on Kansas State University, but on the area and state as a whole, then I’d suggest you’ve never paid a visit anywhere near Manhattan, Kan. in the last 15-20 years. Let me give you an example that many area college football fan can relate. Notre Dame received a financial boost from the Navy when they used the campus as a training site during World War II. Without that boost, there is great doubt whether Notre Dame would even exist today. The Irish continue to play Navy each year as a perpetual ‘thank you’ for saving the university. Snyder’s impact at K-State is just as great. The biggest difference in the comparison is the Fighting Irish had known football success, winning multiple national championships before WWII. K-State was, by many anecdotal accounts, on the verge of being kicked out of the Big 8 Conference because of football futility. Let’s put some numbers to this: Snyder’s first team went 1-10, which exceeded the win total from the previous two seasons combined. In Snyder’s first seven seasons (1989-95), K-State went 36-31-1. This record was three wins better than any other coach in Wildcat football history. It was also three more wins than KSU fans had seen in the previous 14 seasons. From 1975-88, K-State averaged 2.3 win per season. Snyder’s 187 career wins is five-and-a-half times more wins than any other Kansas State coach in a football history that dates back to 1896. In the nine years before Snyder arrived, enrollment had dropped from more than 19,000 students to less than 16,500. Today it’s around 24,300 students. Let’s put some structures to this: KSU Stadium, now Bill Snyder Family Stadium, had seats for about 31,000 people when it opened, and a press box that was a temporary facility when the stadium opened in 1968. A light rain would send writers for cover and make radio personnel nervous in a structure that looked a lot like a single wide mobile home on stilts. A permanent press box was built in 1993, (yes, the temp facility was in use 25 years) and was expanded to include more luxury seating in the last five years. In 1997, there were about 600 hotel rooms in Manhattan. Game days were nothing special to restaurant owners and managers (I can testify to that one personally). Now there are more than double the rooms, and all are booked for two-night minimum stays on game weekends (not just game days anymore). Capacity at the stadium has increased to more than 50,000. Game tickets are hard to come by. There were no football offices in 1989. A building at the north end of the stadium was completed in 1994, and as of the end of this season it’s being torn down and replaced with a much larger facility featuring additional seating, larger locker room and more office space. In 1990, the population of Manhattan was around 43,000, and you could not drive to town without getting on a two-lane highway. Twenty years later, the population has increased 22 percent, and visitors to town now come in on the Bill Snyder Highway, linking Interstate 70 nine miles to the south with the city limits of Manhattan. And finally the anecdotal: The rumor was the University of Arkansas wanted to leave the Southwest Conference and replace KSU in the Big 8. While he was never officially quoted, directly or otherwise, the rumor said Razorback head football coach and athletic director Frank Broyles mentioned replacing K-State specifically. Neither Nebraska nor Oklahoma wanted to come to play in Manhattan. Coaches were rumored to complain about the starters getting too much sun sitting on the bench in the second half of games, and fans from the two schools, hard up for tickets to home games, would often make up more than half of the crowd of 10,000 fans. After Wichita State, a mere two-hour drive from Manhattan, dropped football for economic reasons in 1987, there was genuine concern whether the football program at K-State would follow suit. I don’t have lot of personal experience with the program, but what I do have remains with me. During the Flood of 1993, I was a new-in-town restaurant manager who had no idea what resources were available to me. I was told I had to sandbag the restaurant in case of a levee break. Soon a truckload of sand and 500 empty sandbags were dumped on the parking lot. My crew and I were struggling along when a van pulled up, and 10 K-State football players piled out like circus clowns packed too tightly in a car. How they packed 10 linemen in a 12-passenger van remains a mystery to me. They took over our sandbagging operation and were done in two hours, then left with hardly a word. A local radio station reported similar incidents of K-State athletes helping out around town, and that some football players cut their summers short to come back and help. No football team is completely innocent of all infractions, including Kansas State. In a college town you hear rumors of how the football coach spends his down time in ways not approved by the local church board. But that summer day in 1993, I learned the kind of character Bill Snyder was looking for in his players. In my book he’s been a hall-of-famer long before 2015.
