They knew they weren’t supposed to win.
I thought for a while about how to write that, because it’s different than writing Kansas State’s players knowing they weren’t going to win, and it struck me – there are games this team realizes it has no chance of winning, and then that triggered these thoughts:
How many other times has this happened? How many more times will it happen?
After Saturday’s game, the Wildcats trotted out expressions such as, “We played with them,” or “We were right there.” It was the type of stuff you would have anticipated hearing from North Texas or Montana State had those games been remotely close.
It was a complete mismatch, and K-State was relieved/happy to have been competitive for a quarter and a half. I understand OU is OU, with an array of the best-looking athletes around. I get it.
But if you don’t have those players, how do you get them? By winning. But if you don’t win…
You see what’s happening here? Expectations have been lowered. Less is expected.
There are teams, like OU, that believe all of the games on the schedule can be won. There are teams, like Missouri, that believe enough games on the schedule can be won to win its division. And then there is K-State, a team that hopes enough games on the schedule can be won to reach a bowl game and divert attention away from all that’s going wrong.
And shame on you, the fans, for falling for it if that happens.
You deserve better.
13 Comments
Jeff you hit the nail on the head. We went into this game with the mentality of a team that “knows they are supposed to lose.” Getting real tired of “Bold and Daring”. Thanks for your great coverage. Krause take notice this is what you are building in Manhattan. Is it basketball season yet?!!
i’m right with you, j-mart. i came to k-state in 95 and so i grew up in my fandom when we were a power. i remember ou in 2003 as being the first time i ever went to a k-state game expecting that we would lose… and we know how that turned out. but then we were still good enough that we could have expectations.
now i go to just about any game expecting to lose. the ones i expect to win, i’m still nervous about. i realize that we were in championship talk in the late 90s and early 2000s longer than most schools spend in that talk, but that doesn’t mean we need to spend that much time in the bottoms to make up for it.
if our coaching staff can’t come up anything better than pretending our kicker tripped, then i think it’s time to move on. we’re on a downward spiral, and we need to break that cycle you mentioned before it gets any worse.
much love,
tuf
i agree, but sometimes those comments are ok in a “rebuilding year”
but in a year w/19 juoco’s, and the best qb Ron will ever have, those quotes are terrible.
Obviously, we have a younger set of K-State fans.
I grew up in Manhattan. I still remember when winning three games was a relatively good year, when one or two, or none, was more the norm. When Bill Snyder came, the hope was that K-State could play around .500. What happened was so far in excess of expectations it is still unbelievable to this old K-State fan, which makes comments like these positively surreal:
“now i go to just about any game expecting to lose. the ones i expect to win, i’m still nervous about.”
There used to be NO game K-State was expected to win, even against what were then Division I-AA opponents. And THAT, still, has been the rule of history at K-State.
I am not sure about Prince, but I’m not ready to bail on him quite yet. They should have beaten Colorado and if you take away the turnovers yesterday, the game would have been closer. Right now I see the decline of K-State (which, let’s be honest, started before Ron Prince came on board) as largely part of an overall decline in the Big 12 North. And no major coach wanted to take over after Snyder, especially those who are successfully building their own programs.
I’m not sure whether Prince is, in his first head coaching job, up to the Big 12, but his situation reminds me somewhat of Dana Altman. I do not think it would be a good idea to pull the trigger yet on Prince when K-State still shows signs of competetiveness, because the chances are we might get someone along the lines of a Stan Parrish or Ellis Rainsberger rather than the next Bill Snyder. Remember how well replacing Dana Altman worked for Kansas State basketball?
Speaking of competetiveness: The sports media was so ohhing and ahhing over OU’s first half that they missed the fact that K-State’s offense also racked up yards and points when they weren’t turning the ball over (35 points in a half is a lot), and in the second half they outplayed a coasting OU team (I guarantee you that Stoops will not be happy watching second half game film).
Ooooops. I meant 28 points in a half is still a lot. K-State outscored OU 7-3 in the second half.
K-State football makes me really sad right now. As a college student, I saw three home losses in five years. I can’t believe people now are crowing about winning a half 7-3 when we set a record for futility in the previous half.
Your Blog just gets worse & worse. At one time you actually provided insight with facts. I feel like I am reading a KSUFans.com post by one of the other high school kiddies. K-State fans deserve better.
Agnatha as a college student and having only lived through the DOD the way i look at the situation is just like how JMart described it: we deserve better. just look at the recruiting classes coming in- pathetic. just by being in the big12 conference and being a bcs team should bring in higher caliber of players.
also for our coaches and players to say that our second half performance offers encouragement is complete bs. had stoops wanted to or felt the need to score more if we pulled the game closer he would have had no problem. go back and look at the tape. stoops played the second half a lot more conservatively.
get prince out of here. the fact that he has still not won a game in which he has been trailing at halftime shows he is not capable of handling the HC job. he doesn’t understand how to manage a game as seen in the first halves of the tech and ou game. each we were able to tie it and immediately after prince decides to get bold and daring and go all out aerial assault. each time he completely fails, forces the defense to play more possessions than usual, thus taking us out of the game in the matter of a few minutes.
I’ll restate what I posted last week.
“I’m tired of “seeing where this Wildcat team is”. Isn’t time to expect more? How long before we can expect more? How long before we start holding this coaching staff accountable for the performance of this team?
I’m sorry, but it just isn’t good enough to me to “see where this Wildcat team is” every week.
Sorry J-Mart, my rant is over. I’m frustrated, along with a lot of fans. Season tickets are for sale all over the internet. A lot of perennial season tickets are giving up their seats. I’m afraid there will be a lot of red in the stadium on Saturday, and that will be sad.”
There wasn’t that much red in the stadium Saturday. Mainly because OU fans didn’t feel the need to show up, knowing what the outcome would be. Ron Prince was quoted as saying “the lead at halftime was what it was”. What does that mean?
My first game in Manhattan during the Ron Prince era (I went to Nebraska last year), and the entire atmosphere is watered down compared to just 5 years ago. Very disappointing, and I can’t blame season ticket holders for selling.
Have to appreciate Agnatha’s comments. Especially as relates to previous experience with Dana Altman/Basketball.
I get the feeling there are lots of ‘current’ KSU fans who think that something ‘good’ or even ‘awesome’ was accomplished in basketball this past year…which, in reality was no where close to what used to be ‘routine’ under Hartman and Kruger.
We ‘fired’ Altman for turning in seasons like Martin had this year.
So, how’s that for ‘perspective’?
The point is that Prince is doing some very good work. I greatly appreciate his approach to academics, acceptance of the responsibility of coaches to ‘grow responsible men’ and his passion/focus on working to reposition this program to it’s past winning ways. This will come. But 2 and a half years is way to short of a time to make the kinds of judgements being bandied about on the internet.
Jeffrey Martin: shame on you sir! Drop me an e-mail any time…I’d be more than happy to give you a call or visit in person next time I’m in Wichita.
Were you/did you contribute as vociferously for the ouster of Mangino after his first 2 1/2 years at KU? Or would that have been asking for too much ‘consistency’?
Great, reasoned post couched in perspective Agnatha!
omaha_willie, you stupid slut. Altman made the NCAA’s? Altman beat KU at home? Altman won an NCAA game? Altman had +.500 record in conference play? You stupid loser.
Dana Altman
1991-94 (68-54)
Although his four-year tenure as K-State’s head coach only produced one NCAA Tournament appearance, Dana Altman will be remembered most for his uncanny ability to win close ball games, and for pulling off some of the biggest upsets in school history.
Altman’s teams were a remarkable 28-13 in games decided by six points or less, which included a 6-1 mark in one-point games. His 1992-93 club perpetuated a K-State tradition. Picked to finish last in the Big Eight, Altman’s Cardiac ‘Cats won 11 games in the final minute, earned the school’s first Top 25 ranking in five seasons, finished 19-11, reached the championship game of the Big Eight Tournament and returned K-State to the NCAA Tournament for the 21st time.
Altman’s peers named him Big Eight Coach-of-the-Year in 1993 and he capped the season by upsetting No. 6 Kansas 74-67 in the semifinals of the conference tournament.
The following season, he made it two in a row over KU when he upset the No. 1 ranked Jayhawks 68-64 on ESPN in Lawrence. His 1993-94 squad finished the season with a 20-14 record and advanced to the NIT Final Four in New York City. Following the season, he accepted the head coaching position at Creighton in his home state of Nebraska, where he just concluded his 10th season.
All I have to say is as a student and a Wildcat, I sure hope that I don’t have to keep hearing Prince’s lame excuses in the post game shows this time next year. For the sake of the school, the players, and the fans, we may have to call in Terry Tate office linebacker to help get the program back on track and back to 10 to 12 game winning seasons.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzToNo7A-94&feature=related)