Chris Klieman’s plan for football season includes players on campus before students
It remains unclear when college football games will be played next season, or if fans will be allowed inside campus stadiums to watch them like usual, but Kansas State coach Chris Klieman has a schedule in mind for his team’s potential return to the gridiron.
As long as players are allowed on campus by July 13, he thinks teams will be ready to begin practice by Aug. 1 and then be able to play games as originally scheduled in September.
In other words, he thinks teams will need nearly eight weeks together before they can play a full schedule of 12 games. Any less build up than that would be an injury risk for players, he said. If the season is delayed until October, he would want to begin coaching his players in August. If the season is delayed until March, he would want his players on campus by January.
“We are very optimistic that we are going to play football this season,” Klieman said Friday during a video conference with reporters. “We just don’t know when. So we have got to make sure we are ready as a staff at any time to be ready to go and make sure our players are ready as well.”
The challenge of Klieman’s hypothetical schedule is that it would likely involve K-State players returning to campus before the rest of the school’s student body. For example: the university has already suspended all in-person classes until at least July 31, which would seem to make his July 13 start date untenable.
That is, unless special rules are applied to student-athletes.
“I think it is probably going to have to be that way,” Klieman said. “We may play in front of an empty stadium. I know nobody wants that to happen, but if we are allowed to bring groups of 50 or less back we could at least get a weight workout in and roll them in groups. Based on all the testing and those things that are not my area of expertise, we are very hopeful that at some point we are able to bring our players back, and probably before the general students can come back.”
These are uncharted waters for Klieman and every other football coach in the college ranks. They are all making contingency plans for an upcoming season that lacks a set starting date and they are tutoring their players from afar, communicating mostly via Zoom calls.
Klieman says he has even begun looking at making budget cuts to the team’s usual budget, as he anticipates K-State’s athletic department bringing in less revenue than usual while the world deals with the coronavirus pandemic.
But he isn’t committing to anything just yet.
“We’re going to have to make some,” Klieman said. “We haven’t been pressed upon that. We know we have received some things that say we are going to make some cuts, but we’re still going through those scenarios of where we are going to make some cuts. We want to know what we’re going to deal with come fall, and we don’t want to do something in April and come back and say, ‘Oh, we didn’t have to do that.’ That’s the whole landscape of this environment. I know we have to have time to make decisions, but I think it’s too early to cancel anything or make that kind of drastic adjustments on April 17.”
Klieman is dealing with that uncertainty by calling it “a new normal.” He says that the Wildcats are beginning to get used to their routines in isolation. Coaches are still recruiting and players are still finding ways to get better. Klieman got a kick out of watching video of one of his players pushing a pickup truck across a parking lot as a leg workout.
They are all preparing for football to return at some point in the near future.
Klieman can’t envision an academic year going by without it.
“It’s kind of the fabric of our society,” Klieman said. “I’d hate to imagine going through a fall and not driving by a high school stadium, or not having my son, who’s going to be a junior at Manhattan High School, getting ready for a high school practice or a high school season, because that is so much fun, and those kids, they don’t know how many years they’re playing as a young player. It’s so important for those guys to have that ability to compete and to be on a team.”
“When you look at college and the NFL, our world needs sports, they need every sport, and football brings everyone together. Now, that may be unique this year, if it does bring everybody together, but in the same respect, we have to find a way to play it financially as much as anything, because it will help every other sport, and it will help us, and help our university from the revenue standpoint ... That’s a tough pill to swallow if we can’t have it.”
This story was originally published April 17, 2020 at 12:41 PM with the headline "Chris Klieman’s plan for football season includes players on campus before students."