Best turnaround job in college football history: Indiana now or K-State then?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Indiana reached the CFP final after a 3-9 season two years earlier, defeating Alabama.
- Kansas State under Bill Snyder rebuilt a 3-40-1 stretch into sustained wins.
- ESPN and Wall Street Journal argue Indiana’s turnaround may top Snyder’s legacy.
As a touchdown-plus favorite to defeat the Miami Hurricanes in Monday’s CFP National Championship Game, Indiana stands on the doorstep of the preposterous.
A program with five bowl victories in its history — two in this year’s playoff run — is favored to beat the five-time national champion Hurricanes.
Indiana reached this position after crushing Alabama in the Rose Bowl and Oregon in the Peach Bowl. For a team that finished 3-9 two years ago and entered this season with the most losses by a program in major college football history, winning it all with a 16-0 record would move the needle to mind-bending.
But would it be the greatest turnaround in college football history?
Rece Davis, the ESPN journalist and host of “College GameDay” says yes — that Indiana’s achievement exceeds that of Kansas State and Bill Snyder nearly four decades earlier.
“These sports arguments, it’s part of what we do,” Davis said. “But going from the losingest program in the history of the sport to the national title game is pretty incredible. I think it’s the magnitude of the accomplishment.”
There’s more. The lead on a Wall Street Journal story this week reads, “No turnaround in the history of college football has been as remarkable as what Curt Cignetti has accomplished at Indiana.”
The Hoosiers’ case is compelling and fresh, but can it really top the rags-to-riches tale of Snyder and Kansas State?
It may comes well come down to the question of “Who, historically, stunk more?” And in this aspect it’s difficult to top the dreadful lifespan of the pre-Snyder Wildcats, starting with a thought from former university president Jon Wefald in his book, “The Transformational Years at Kansas State.”
“Football was never a priority ... The necessary willpower was missing” wrote Wefald, who died in 2022.
That’s what Snyder observed when he arrived in Manhattan from Iowa, where he had served as Hayden Fry’s offensive coordinator.
“More than anything there was a feeling that it could never be done,” Snyder said. “It had always been this way and it will always be this way.
“It wasn’t an easy thing to do to convince people that it could change. But I was young, and we all have those dreams we believe in.”
Naysayers came loaded with evidence. The K-State program Snyder sought to transform had recorded the most losses in college football to that point.
Until Cignetti arrived, the Hoosiers were 1-72 against AP top-five teams. From the time the AP poll began in 1936, Kansas State went 33 years before beating a single ranked opponent.
The NCAA scholarship limit was 95 when Snyder arrived. The Wildcats had less than half of that.
“Nearly everyone had bailed and didn’t want to be a part of it,” Snyder said. “We were so very limited.”
Here is where the conditions of the time make it difficult to compare the two programs’ accomplishments. When Indiana hired Cignetti, 13 players from his previous stop at James Madison were among the program’s 30 incoming transfers.
And before this season another 22 transfers arrived in Bloomington, including Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Fernando Mendoza.
No such opportunity to transfer and become immediately eligible existed in 1989. Nor did legal payments to players in the form of name, image and likeness, and revenue from the House Settlement Agreement.
Cignetti could microwave a turnaround. But in fairness, even without the benefit of today’s player-friendly rules, he accomplished similar about-faces at previous schools.
“I win. Google me,” was his viral quote soon after being hired in Bloomington.
Snyder’s turnaround was more slow-cooked. Some blind faith was required. So was revenue.
Money was tight at Kansas State. In the 1987-88 school year, the university’s athletic budget was around $6 million, less than half of Oklahoma’s football budget.
There had been brief bursts of hope in Manhattan. The Lynn Dickey-led teams of 1969 and 1970 went 11-10, the only two-year stretch above .500 from 1955 until Snyder’s second and third teams in the early 1990s.
The Wildcats of 1982 posted a 6-4-1 record, good enough for the program’s lone pre-Snyder bowl season. Despite operating with some of the league’s worst facilities, Kansas State seemed to have figured some things out in the early 1980s under Jim Dickey.
Wildcats radio analyst Stan Weber transitioned from defensive back to quarterback at the time and believed the program had turned a corner.
“By the time I got there, Kansas State was playing some of the best football in its history,” Weber said. “It was tough to compete with Nebraska and Oklahoma, but we were competing with the middle of the Big Eight.”
It didn’t last. After an 0-2 start in 1985, Dickey was fired and the despair returned. From 1985 through 1988, Kansas State went 3-40-1.
Indiana has experienced the pain of a double-digit loss season five times, but never in consecutive years. Kansas State has nine seasons with double-digit losses, including a back-to-back-to-back.
The last of those 10-loss seasons happened in Snyder’s first year. But Weber, by then in his third year in the broadcast booth, said he had noticed a difference when watching a Snyder practice for the first time.
Weber didn’t see a great feat of athleticism or hear a coach’s profound statement. What caught his attention was the reaction by a wide receiver who didn’t come up with a catch on a routine passing drill.
Instead of laughing it off, the player sprinted to where the ball had settled, fired it back to the manager and hustled to get back in line. Weber turned to the small group he was with, including then play-by-play man Mitch Holthus, now with the NFL’s Chiefs, and made a declaration.
“’We’re going to win,’ I told them,” Weber said. “This is the right stuff. They believe they’re doing the right things, and these guys are being coached.”
Snyder’s second team finished 5-6 and won games in the Big Eight for the first time in four years. In 1991, K-State went an astonishing 7-4. Since joining a conference in 1913, no Wildcats team had posted more victories.
Kansas State under Snyder was up and running. Starting in 1993, the Wildcats were ranked at least one week in the AP poll for 12 straight seasons. There were bowl streaks of 11 and eight years.
And after posting the third-fewest victories in college football in the 1980s, the Wildcats logged the 11th-most wins in the 1990s, ahead of Alabama and Notre Dame.
The closest they came to what Cignetti and Indiana have accomplished — two straight years in the CFP and now a finalist berth — came in 1998. A victory in the Big 12 Championship Game against Texas A&M would have sent the Wildcats to the national title game.
Instead, the Wildcats were upset by the Aggies in double overtime.
Snyder stepped down from his second stint as the Wildcats’ head coach in 2018. The winning largely continued under his successor, Chris Klieman, who left the job after this past season.
For 2026, former K-State star quarterback Collin Klein takes over a program with Snyder’s statue in front of the stadium bearing his name. Coach Bill Snyder Highway leads into Manhattan.
For his part, Snyder said he has enjoyed watching Indiana play this season.
“It’s quite obvious they’ve done a wonderful job, there, the players, the coaches,” he said. “And there’s great fan support.”
The better turnaround job? Both coaches achieved the seemingly impossible. Indiana’s 180 went faster and farther. Kansas State’s likely started from greater depths ... and showed such turnarounds could be accomplished.
This story was originally published January 16, 2026 at 5:30 AM.