Why Chris Klieman was surprisingly upbeat after Kansas State’s blowout loss to Texas
Chris Klieman didn’t spend much time sulking in the aftermath of Kansas State’s surprisingly lopsided 69-31 defeat against Texas on Saturday at Bill Snyder Family Stadium.
Instead, the Wildcats’ second-year coach praised his players for making it through a trying season without postponing or canceling a single game, as many other teams have done, because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Disappointed in the loss. Disappointed in the outcome. Not disappointed in the resolve and effort of our players,” Klieman said. “Not disappointed in the fact that we played 10 football games this year. Not many people did play that many games. For our guys to battle with all the adversity that they faced, whether it be injuries to COVID, opt-outs to transfers, everything that those kids faced. Those kids came to work everyday, and they battled.”
For many coaches, this would be a soul-searching loss. The Longhorns beat the Wildcats like few other teams have in recent years. Their 69 points were the most by a K-State opponent since Nebraska scored 73 in 2007. Their seven rushing touchdowns were the most by a K-State opponent since the old Big Eight days. And they had that much success despite entering the games with rumors swirling about their coach’s job security.
The Wildcats also ended the regular season with five straight defeats after a 4-1 start and are only in contention for a bowl invitation at 4-6 overall and 4-5 in the Big 12 because every team is eligible for the postseason this year, regardless of record. These are frustrating times.
“There are some things,” Klieman said, “that we have to get a lot better at. ... We have to get bigger. We have to get stronger. We have to get heavier. We have to do all those things, because we were mismatched today.”
But Klieman is different from other coaches.
So much so, that he doesn’t see himself raising many difficult decisions this offseason and perhaps changing the way he runs the program at a macro level.
“I don’t know how you can even ask that,” Klieman said. “We didn’t have an offseason last year. That’s a tough one for me to answer. We re-evaluate everything whether we win five in a row, lose one in a row, lose five in a row. When we didn’t have an offseason and didn’t have a summer, that’s a tough one to answer.”
Klieman refused to go there, because he believes a solid foundation is in place for K-State football. If not for a pair of last-second losses against Oklahoma State and Baylor, he said, the Wildcats would have been playing for a berth in the Big 12 championship game on Saturday. In his mind, they weren’t far away from having a special season.
He is glad Deuce Vaughn broke the school’s freshman record for both rushing yards (642) and all-purpose yards (1,221). He is proud of Will Howard for setting the school’s freshman record for touchdown passes (eight) during his first few games in control of K-State’s offense. He called Howard “a winner.”
Those are valid points.
But K-State also suffered three blowout losses in its final five games, and those defeats shined some light on persisting problems.
The team’s biggest problem at the moment seems to be tackling. Texas running backs Bijan Robinson and Roschon Johnson made K-State defenders look silly, continually bouncing off tackles for a combined 311 yards and six touchdowns. On one goal-line run, at least five K-State defenders made contact with Johnson in the backfield and he still powered through for a touchdown.
While some of that can be explained by a plethora of personnel losses that left Klieman saying “we ran out of players” on defense. But it doesn’t explain why K-State also surrendered big yardage in many of its other recent games.
“It’s been really hard,” K-State defensive end Wyatt Hubert said. “COVID has obviously attacked our program a lot compared to many other programs. Coach Klieman just always says the next guy needs to be ready to step up. We do have a lot of inexperience, younger guys back there with not a whole lot of experience so that kind of hurts us sometimes. They’re learning, they’re developing. But no matter what the circumstances are we are going to go out there and try to do our best.”
K-State must also improve at quarterback. Though Howard managed to complete 16 of 27 passes for 174 yards and two touchdowns, he also tossed a pair of costly interceptions.
“I’ve got to take care of the ball better,” Howard said. “There’s no excuses for that. I need to take care of the ball better. That’s been a problem that I’ve dealt with this year. That’s something that our team has struggled with, and I need to take care of the ball better. That definitely hurt us. We had our offense rolling at times, but there was just some little things like turnovers and some little missed assignments, missed reads by me. We all take responsibility for it, and we know what we need to do to be better.”
The Wildcats will begin working on some of those things next week as they begin preparing for a potential bowl game.
K-State players say they are excited about the opportunity to play one more game together, even after finishing the regular season with a losing record.
There were no tears after this loss. Most of K-State’s seniors actually spent time smiling for pictures with family and friends on the field when the game was over. The season didn’t end the way they hoped, but playing in 10 games beat the alternative. Perhaps they will learn something from this season moving forward, even if the Wildcats currently seem to be stuck in reverse.
“We’ll bounce back,” Klieman said. “Our kids have really good resolve. I don’t know what seniors are going to do. We’ll need to go that route and talk about it. The guys that are coming back, I told them that we need to do better as coaches and we will. Players need to do better and take ownership for the program. That’s when we’ll turn the corner is when the kids take the ownership of the program and not the coaches. We have enough of the right guys coming back that I believe that can happen.”
This story was originally published December 5, 2020 at 7:03 PM with the headline "Why Chris Klieman was surprisingly upbeat after Kansas State’s blowout loss to Texas."