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The original was posted on /r/cfb by /u/matte_purple on 2024-12-02 23:29:31+00:00.

6 years ago today (December 2nd, 2018) Bill Snyder retired from his second stint as head football coach at Kansas State University.

He coached at K-State for 29 seasons, hired after HC Stan Weber was let go after the 1988 Wildcats went 0-11. At his news conference Snyder said that “the opportunity for the greatest turnaround for college football exists here today.”

K-State was very close to ceasing their football program altogether before the University of Iowa OC was brought on as head coach. Looking back at the 76 seasons from 1913 upon joining the Missouri Valley Conference to 1988 - the season before Snyder officially took over - Kansas State had:

-⁠A .341 winning percentage, 231-462-33 record. That was the worst in college football over that time span by an incredible margin. If you gave Northwestern (the next worst team) 100 additional losses, they would still be above Kansas State with a .344 winning percentage.

-Seven 0-win seasons

-29 seasons with fewer than 3 wins

⁠-17 losses and 8 ties against Division 1-AA or FCS teams.

⁠-One bowl appearance, a 14-3 loss against Wisconsin in the 1982 Independence Bowl.

-A 63-300-16 record against teams who finished with a record above .500

-A 1-119 record against teams who finished the season ranked in the AP Poll. Their only win was in 1970 against an OU team who finished 7-4-1, ranked #20.

-The last coach with a winning record was Pappy Waldorf (7-2-1) in 1934, a whopping 54 YEARS before the Snyder hire.

Bill Synder took over a program that was definitively the historically worst program in college football, coming off a 3-40-1 record over the past 4 years, and even labeled “Futility U” in a Sports Illustrated article the following season.

Over the next 15 seasons Snyder led the team to six top-10 finishes. He took a team that had reached only 7 or more wins in their near 100-year history only 6 times (with over 8 wins only one time) and brought them ten 9+ win seasons in his first 15 years, with six of those being 11-win seasons. He went to 19 bowl games with the Wildcats (of K-State’s 21 total before his retirement). He won two conference titles, achieved two No. 1 national rankings, coached players who received 214 total All-American honors and 13 Academic All-Americans, was a five-time national coach of the year and seven-time conference coach of the year and also became just the fourth active coach to be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2015.

He revamped facilities that were labeled “worse than high school” early on with his own paychecks. He inspired a new foundation of K-State. He rebuilt a town by restoring football and saved a university with his herculean effort, pride and belief in his players, rigorous practices, and incredible attention to detail.

I cannot imagine anyone will ever be able to complete a turn-around like Bill Synder did. If you want to know more and hear it straight from Bill Snyder’s first team, watch this documentary on YouTube: “The Miracle in Manhattan”