Why Chris Klieman wants K-State to play in a bowl game ... even if Cats finish 4-6
Bowl invitations are usually reserved exclusively for college football teams that win six or more games, but failing to reach that benchmark might not stop Kansas State from playing in the postseason this year.
With teams facing radically different schedules based on conference affiliation and COVID-19 testing, bowl officials decided to suspend their normal requirements for inclusion, which means every team in the country is technically bowl eligible regardless of their record.
If a team wants to play in a bowl game, all it needs is an invite, assuming bowl games are played as scheduled. For the record: The Kansas State Wildcats are hoping for one.
“Absolutely,” K-State coach Chris Klieman said Tuesday. “We need time, we need practice time and we need development time. So many guys have missed between 14 and 30 days since we started this whole thing. When you think of the guys who have missed three weeks of practice time, we are talking about just trying to get a couple weeks back ... If a bowl game allows us to get that extra time back, we definitely want to have it and be a part of it.”
Odds are good that K-State (4-5, 4-4 Big 12) will get a look from one of the Big 12’s lower-tier bowl games following its regular-season finale against Texas.
Most bowl projections currently have the Wildcats playing in the Guaranteed Rate Bowl against a Pac-12 opponent on Dec. 26 in Phoenix or the Lockheed Martin Armed Forces Bowl against a team from the American Athletic Conference on Dec. 31 in Fort Worth.
A victory over the Longhorns could push the Wildcats up the pecking order to a more prestigious game. It’s also possible a defeat could leave them looking elsewhere for a postseason invite, or leave them out of the mix entirely. But that seems unlikely, as the Big 12 has tie-ins with six bowls outside of the playoff-affiliated games, and K-State is currently in a sixth-place tie with TCU in the conference standings. It will likely receive a bowl invite no matter what happens this weekend.
Strange as it sounds for the Wildcats to be eyeing a bowl with just four or five victories, Klieman thinks it would be a valuable experience for his team.
So much so, that he plans to continue holding practices next week, long before they learn of their bowl fate.
“Is it going to make a difference come 2021? Potentially it could,” Klieman said, “especially for those young players. We are going to practice a little bit next week because everyone is bowl eligible, but for us it’s not going to be the Elijah Sullivans and Drew Wileys and Noah Johnsons practicing. It’s going to be the young guys going out there for a brief time, an hour and a half, working their fundamental skills and working those guys on technique so we can continue to develop.
“We are a developmental program and when you lose the amount of time that we have with these young guys we have to find ways to get it back.”
This story was originally published December 1, 2020 at 2:39 PM with the headline "Why Chris Klieman wants K-State to play in a bowl game ... even if Cats finish 4-6."