IT'S SNYDER (?)

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=3722069

With the way this coaching search has gone, it may not be safe to report who K-State's next head coach is until the first football game begins next season.  However, it appears an announcement will be made tomorrow morning that Bill Snyder will return to coach the program he essentially established.

The strength of this hire will depend on the assistant coaches who Snyder brings with him.  Weak assistant coaching produced the sub-par seasons in 2004 and 2005 leading up to his "retirement," so bringing in top-notch assistants will be priority #1.

TURN OFF THE LIGHTS

It's not been a great few weeks at K-State.  Firings.  Tangled coaching searches.  Blowout losses to the biggest rivals.  And now, this: 

A couple of squirrels put Kansas State University in the dark for a few hours.

The Manhattan campus was without electricity for more than three hours Monday. The university says power was cut when two squirrels got into a Westar Energy transformer.

COMIC TRAGEDY

Well, great.  Just great.  The Chiefs lose yet again.  K-State gets pounded by the Huskers.  And now, we learn that Fire Joe Morgan is shutting it down, even though their eponymous purpose remains unaccomplished.  

Sure, it was never really about ridding our airwaves of that menace to intelligent baseball discussion/albatross around the neck of the Best Voice in Baseball.  In fact, they seem a bit ashamed of the name, now.  

It wasn't even all about the stats.  It was about comedy, and using that comedy to poke holes in the silly, illogical, dusty old memes of baseball.  They took VORP and OPS and translated them into something accessible to those outside the laboratories of baseball's mad SABRmetricians, helping to show that the doctrines of the stat guys, are often, above all else, just rooted in plain old common sense.

You can find "best of" lists elsewhere.  Around here, nearly every post we read was "best," at least until the next one, and we're sad to see FJM go.  Still, in both sports and comedy there's something to be said for leaving while people still feel that way.  In the words of one wise sage, "Showmanship, George. When you hit that high note, you say goodnight and walk off."

ONE LAST THING ON THAT PATTERSON LEAK...

All of the involved parties have dutifully stuck to the "lay low and deny" script since last Friday's premature announcement of the impending hire of Gary Patterson to K-State.  As a result, most of the furor has died down, and the story is nearly completely off the news cycle...at least for the next week or two.

One final point here about the mistake made by GoPowercat.com and its main man, Tim Fitzgerald.  We have no doubt that "Fitz" had highly-connected sources telling him that a deal was done.  We're pretty sure that a deal was, in fact, ready to go.  The problem was that it wasn't time to announce it.

Now, let's lay aside for a moment the possibility that Patterson and/or his agent were playing Fitz for market purposes.  Assuming that a deal was in place, Fitz's mistake did not lie in passing along this information in some way.  The mistake he made was in the way he passed it on.

Fitz runs a subscription-based message board which only subscribers can access.  He could have merely put up a post on the private board, along the lines of "We are hearing from trusted sources that a deal is in place with Patterson.  However, we have not confirmed this with the K-State administration and with Patterson, so we're not going to run a story on it until we do."  If he had done this, it might still have eventually touched off something of a reaction, but it probably wouldn't have been the firestorm he created by the way he broke the story.

Instead, Fitz ran a story on the front page of the site, where anyone could read it, and then got on WHB 810 in Kansas City to discuss the story.

It's entirely possible that the source that gave the story to Fitz thought that Fitz would, in fact, handle the story in the more discreet way described above, rather than broadcasting it immediately to the world.  If so, it's also entirely possible that the source who gave the story to Fitz is now one of the parties denying it.

Why did Fitz choose to break the story the way he did?  Our guess is that it's because he's recently been scooped by other media outlets on K-State news.  For instance, the Wichita Eagle's Jeffrey Martin broke the story of Prince's firing.  Folks subscribe to Fitz's website because they want the inside access and early scoop the site promises.  If Fitz's delivery of such information continued to slow, then it could negatively impact business.  So perhaps this time, Fitz was a bit more impatient to run with the story as loudly as he could, rather than playing it lower key for a while.

IN WHICH WE JOIN THE CHORUS

Um...Mike Jacobs?

Great move, Dayton.  We couldn't say it better ourselves, so we won't even try.  When you have pre-emptive WTF's, it's a pretty bad sign.

The good news is that he's not looking to make any free agent moves this offseason.  So, you know, the only thing he could F up are some more trades.  Zack Greinke seems like a likely target. Perhaps we could get another low-OBP "slugger" to complete our lineup.

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO 1-15

So the Chiefs were 15+ point underdogs against a dysfunctional San Diego Chargers team this weekend, and managed to come within a two-point conversion of winning the game. This was the third-straight week the Chiefs looked like an actual NFL team...and this week was perhaps the most impressive, with starters, reserves, and reserves' reserves dropping like flies out there.

So let's just say this now: it would be a huge mistake to fire Herm Edwards anytime soon. A few weeks ago, we wrote that he was on the hot seat, and he still may be with some Chiefs' fans, but it would be a horrid mistake to get rid of Herm before he gets another couple of years with this team. Herm has taken a group of rookies, retreads, and one Hall-of-Fame tight end over the last few weeks and has gotten them to battle playoff teams down to the wire. The improvement in this team, despite the injury plague, is unmistakable.

There are also other positive signs.  Herm's decision to go for two to win this week was absolutely the correct call, but one that too few NFL head coaches will make.  It's refreshing to see a guy who loves to win football games as traditionally as possible to make such a non-traditional call.

Along the same lines is Herm's decision to allow Chan Gailey to retool the offense to put Tyler Thigpen in a position where he now looks to be at least a good NFL backup QB, with a potentially greater upside.  Who would have ever thought we'd see a spread-oriented offense from a Herm Edwards team?

The ideal in any football situation is to be able to run the ball every play and win the game.  Sometimes, circumstances don't allow it.  One of the marks of a good coach is to adapt to circumstances...to not attempt to force a square peg into a round hole.  

Look at Bill Snyder.  He spent years trying to catch up to Nebraska's bulldozer running attack.  He began by airing the ball out, because that's the personnel he could recruit, and his smaller offensive linemen just couldn't move guys out of the way for runs.   As he acquired bigger and stronger offensive linemen and running backs, he turned more and more to a ground game accentuated by a killer play-action attack.  Perhaps the apex of Snyder's tenure was late in the season in 2003.  The Cats had just destroyed the Huskers in Lincoln, and returned home to Manhattan to finish the regular season and wrap up the North title against Mizzou at home.  The entire second half of that game consisted of Darren Sproles halfback dives up the middle.  The K-State linemen just bulldozed the Mizzou d-line back for 5-6 yards a play.  It was boring, but it was terribly effective.    

Someday, Herm may have the personnel to accompish the same thing here in KC.  But for right now, Herm's living up to his mantra of "You play to win the game."  It's refreshing to see, it appears to be producing results, and it should be supported by KC fans.  

AS THE K-STATE WORLD TURNS

The soap opera known as Kansas State University athletics gave us another humdinger of an episode this week, following up on such hits as "The Ron Prince Hire," "The Bob Huggins Hire," and "The Frank Martin Hire."

As we posted a couple of weeks ago, Ron Prince needed to be concerned about his job security.  Another blowout loss against KU proved to be the last straw.  On Wednesday, a bizarre press teleconference was held in which Prince's "resignfiring" was confirmed.  K-State athletic director Bob Krause announced he would be looking for a coach with successful head coaching experience and hoped to have a hire by the end of the season.

ESPN and some other national outlets are criticizing the Prince firing, saying that he was given too little time after showing signs of promise (namely, his two wins against Texas).  This is a result of these commentator's ignorance as to the reality of the situation in Manhattan.  Those media covering K-State agree that Prince has not shown promising signs for the future, and perhaps the most telltale sign is that fans of other local schools were fully in favor of Prince getting another 2 or 3 or 8 years.  

Prince's two biggest problems were his inability to attract and retain qualified assistant coaches to Manhattan, and a huge dropoff in recruiting quality after getting Josh Freeman as one of his first actions as K-State coach.  No program can be positioned for long-term success without solid assistant coaching and solid recruiting, and K-State had neither under Prince.  The fact that he was oh-fer against Nebraska, KU, and Mizzou was just icing on the Ron Prince fail-cake.

So it was announced that Prince would be gone after the season but would coach the remaining games.  Most folks following the K-State program expected an announcement on a new coach in a couple of weeks, after other teams concluded their seasons.  Names such as Phil Fulmer and Dennis Franchione were thrown about, but most opinion seemed to favor Gary Patterson from TCU as the #1 choice to replace Prince.  A rumor was also going around that Bill Snyder would want to come back if K-State couldn't successfully bring in one of the first few choices, with the idea that Snyder would then groom his successor over the next few years...somone such as Brent Venables or Dana Dimel.

Then, on Friday afternoon, GoPowercat.com surprised everyone by announcing that their sources indicated that Gary Patterson had agreed to be K-State's next coach.  Wildcat fans begain celebrating wildly.  However, only an hour later, GoPowercat.com retracted the story in the face of adamant denials by Patterson and the K-State administration.  Indications were that an agreement was probably in place, but was not supposed to be announced for a couple of weeks, until Patterson finished the season at TCU and had the opportunity to inform those around him of the decision himself.

The situation now is unclear.  Those around K-State are clearly attempting to do damage control by playing off the GoPowercat.com story as a complete fabrication.  Patterson blamed the story on some rival school attempting to steal recruits away from TCU.  It appears K-State will attempt to conduct a search process and then hire Patterson once his season is over.  The question now is whether Patterson is so pissed at K-State that he is no longer interested...or even whether Patterson and his agent orchestrated this whole drama just to drive up his asking price on the open market.   

It seems likely that if Patterson now falls through, K-State will turn to Snyder to coach for at least the next few years.  While the K-State faithful would love to hire Patterson, having a fallback option of the coach who already brought your program back from the college football abyss is not the worst scenario in the world.  While Snyder suffered a dropoff in his last couple of years, much of this seemed due to his assistant coaches at that point.  With new assistants and recharged from his three-year "retirement," Snyder could very well return K-State to college football respectability and prepare the ground for a promising young head-coach-in-waiting.