How one of Bill Snyder’s final acts became a hidden gift for Chris Klieman’s Wildcats
Kansas State’s locker room, along with most others in the country, is usually organized by position group.
Coaches want quarterbacks to spend as much time as possible with other quarterbacks and defensive tackles with defensive tackles. But a few days before Bill Snyder retired as K-State football coach, the Wildcats entered the locker room to something different.
The name plates on the lockers were moved.
The locker room wasn’t organized by position, name, class or jersey number. It was presumably random.
Senior defensive end Kyle Ball said it was clear the position groups were purposefully scattered across the locker room. As the players did more analysis, Ball said they noticed the team leaders were spread out, too.
“Then he retired a couple days later,” Ball said.
Ball said the players had no idea Snyder was retiring, and he remembers a position coach swearing to him Snyder was staying for another season.
“I thought he had some kind of plan,” Ball said. “But he had a different plan.”
Snyder retired Dec. 2. The program had been left without one of college football’s titans before, but he came back after a three-year retirement. This one was for good after 215 wins and 27 seasons with K-State.
The locker room curveball wasn’t received well at first, said Trey Dishon, a redshirt senior defensive tackle. He said at K-State, the defensive backs are the tightest group. They do everything together.
When the cornerbacks weren’t next to one another and had to mix with offensive linemen from small towns in Kansas, Dishon said they probably didn’t know a lot about one another at first.
He said he was next to senior center Adam Holtorf and sophomore receiver Dylan Wentzel, a walk-on. Dishon never had much of any reason to talk with either player, but when he was virtually forced to, he made new connections.
Dishon said he never understood the purpose of the locker room change until Tuesday, when he was asked whether it brought the team together. He said he knew Snyder and Chris Dawson, K-State’s strength and conditioning coach, talked about it.
“It brought people together who normally never would, I think,” Dishon said. “Looking back on it, I see what he was doing.”
Some players didn’t mind the change, like redshirt sophomore defensive end Wyatt Hubert, one of the 2019 team captains. Hubert said he was moved between redshirt freshman quarterback John Holcombe II and first-year Wildcat John Alexander, a defensive back out of Kilgore Junior College.
Holcombe was seen as a possible future replacement for junior Skylar Thompson before he entered the transfer portal and left the team this season. Alexander was new to the program and seen as an instant producer for the Wildcat defense.
Hubert was their leader, at least for those few months. Hubert said it was by design.
“There was a lot more input and strategy into it than we thought,” Hubert said.
The locker room layout lasted throughout offseason workouts, Ball said. Chris Klieman was hired from North Dakota State on Dec. 10. The Wildcats went eight sleeps without a coach, but even after Klieman was hired, the locker room stayed the same until camp.
In that short time without a coach, Dishon said everyone, including the players themselves, carried their weight to make sure the players didn’t feel left in the cold. Part of Snyder’s locker room design was meant to gear his players for arguably the biggest change in program history and ensure they had the gumption to fight through it.
“Credit to all the people in the program,” Dishon said. “That goes for the staff, training staff, strength staff, even the graduate assistants. Travis Britz is a G.A. here now, and he was on the team when I got here. Guys like that were constantly around us telling us to stick it out and that we were going to do something special.”
The Wildcats enter the final game of the regular season at home against Iowa State with two more wins than they had last season.
“I think that was (Snyder) knowing that time was going to come, and he wanted us to rely on each other and be close-knitted,” Ball said. “I think that might have made the transition a little bit easier.”
“Snyder is always up to something. He’s very detailed, and there’s always a reason behind everything he does.”