OPINION: Rivals and columns and Bill Snyder

It’s a slow time in the college-sports news cycle, what with football more than a month away. The next season, in case you’ve lost track, is conference realignment season. Get ready for more stories about either the inevitable march forward of the all-powerful Big 12, or else its imminent collapse. I lose track.

Anyway, during the gap, columnists – and yes, I’m one – tend to write stuff intended to stir up the audience. The latest of local relevance was somebody arguing that Lance Leipold’s job resurrecting KU football is more impressive than Bill Snyder’s magic trick creating a football program out of a Dumpster fire at K-State.

It’s a hilarious assertion, but before I engage in it, I’d like to back away and remind you why this is happening. The easiest way to think of this is to remember the original Internet website that did this: It was called “rivals.com,” because the basic concept was to stir up fans of rival schools to get worked up about their hated enemy so as to goose website traffic, thereby selling ads and making money.

It basically worked, and that’s why you still see bits like this. It’s better if a reporter can coax a provocative comment out of a coach in an interview, or if you can get a clown like Gavin Potter to say something disparaging, but, as I said at the outset, this is a slow news cycle. Gotta just make it up outta your head.

So, back to the subject at hand. Leipold has been at KU three years, and has done a remarkable job. The Jayhawks had been bad since they ran off Mangino in 2009, sometimes laughably bad. Last year, they won nine games. Very, very impressive. Leipold clearly knows what he’s doing.

But nobody younger than 50 could possibly have any clue what Snyder walked into in Manhattan in 1988. K-State was easily – by far – the worst program in the country, and really had been for decades. It wasn’t just the records, which were in and of themselves spectacularly bad. It was the whole thing: Facilities, attitude, money, expectations. They were talking about getting rid of football entirely, or moving K-State out of the Big 8. The last game I saw, before I went away for a decade, was when the Cats managed to blow a lead in the last minute of the season-opener and lost to Austin Peay – and then it rained on the Willie Nelson concert afterward. Again – not just the loss, not even just the way the loss happened. Rain!

Everything. Everything was bad. Stan Parrish came in with the “Air Parrish” attack, then ran the ball a million times in his first game, asking reporters afterward, “Is it always so windy here?” (Insert head-slap emoji here.) My buddy once drove his beat-up jalopy down the ambulance ramp, parked and watched most of the second half from his car at the back corner of the end zone. Nobody cared, because nobody was paying attention.

Yes, KU was bad, too. But not like that. I remember the Oklahoma starters taking off their pads and yukking it up on the sideline in the third quarter. I remember the stadium full of disingenuously nice Nebraska fans, pointing out that the guy running up and down the field unimpeded was their fourth-string tailback.

On and on I could go.

I came back to town a decade after that Austin Peay comedy session, and K-State beat Texas Tech in the first game of the Big 12’s existence, in front of an extremely loud packed house, and it was as if I’d landed on the moon. Two years later the Cats were the best team in the country; Snyder had them beating Nebraska and drumming OU.

Bill Snyder, said Barry Switzer, wasn’t the coach of the year, or the coach of the decade. He was the coach of the century.

Nothing has ever come close to that, and I can’t imagine anything ever will.