‘This is a marathon’: Why K-State coach Chris Klieman won’t take shortcuts this year
The Kansas State football team didn’t begin the week with a long or grueling practice designed to help the Wildcats move on from a disappointing loss to Arkansas State and begin preparing for a difficult road game against Oklahoma.
Instead, they held a series of meetings that lasted “an awful long time” and featured “tough conversations.”
“I believe moving forward there’s going to be some positive things coming out of those conversations,” K-State coach Chris Klieman said, “mainly because we don’t know what 2020 holds. None of us do, and none of us have a crystal ball to see what’s going to happen the rest of the fall of 2020. We need to be better, bottom line.”
Dropping a home opener for the first time since 2013 left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.
But no one is hitting the panic button, even with one of the toughest games on the schedule coming up next.
Klieman said he had a talk with his coaching staff about possibly deviating from their base package and trying some new things that might help the Wildcats win games with a depleted roster this season. They were without nearly two dozen players against the Red Wolves and no one can be sure what their personnel numbers will look like next week, because of COVID testing and contact tracing.
Tempting as it might sound to focus more on short-term results than long-term success, Klieman said he decided against taking shortcuts this season.
“Our guys have to learn that if the first guy goes down, second guy goes down, third guy goes down, it doesn’t matter,” Klieman said. “You’re wearing K-State and you have to make plays.”
Under different circumstances, Klieman said he might consider making some unconventional coaching decisions this season. But he never took that approach during his run of FCS championships at North Dakota State. And he isn’t going to change now.
“If I was in year eight, I might say that we should try to throw some gimmicks in there,” Klieman said. “Let’s try to fool some people. But we’re in year two. We are going to follow our philosophy and rules and principles, even if that is playing at a position where we are down. Even if that’s playing somewhere we aren’t as equipped at other spots because this is an absolute marathon for me here and not a sprint.
“I’m not sprinting to say that I have to do this so that I can go and get another job or I can do this. We, as a staff, are making sure that this is a marathon so that we, as a staff, are here for the long term. I’m not a quick-fix guy.”
He said that is one of the reasons why he has never targeted an abundance of junior-college players in a single recruiting cycle. It’s one of the reasons why he values player development as much as raw talent.
There’s a reason Klieman likes to say Carson Wentz was a “zero-star guy” when he signed with North Dakota State.
It’s the same reason why Klieman won’t change his coaching style now.
“Are we going to maybe take some lumps periodically this year? We may have to,” Klieman said, “because I don’t want to say, come spring of 2021, ‘Let’s get back to what we wanted to try to do,’ because now I think you’ve lost a ton of time.”