Collin Klein, the lone 2012 Heisman Trophy finalist yet to be the focus of a Netflix documentary, stars in one of the upcoming college football’s most compelling on-field stories.
Klein heads into his debut season as head coach at his alma mater, Kansas State, most notable for being The Other Guy in one of the more memorable Heisman presentations of the 21st century.
Do not confuse this particular other’ing as a slight of Klein’s quarterbacking duties; his tenure at K-State stacks up well when compared to his contemporary stars. He accounted for 40 and 39 combined passing and rushing touchdowns in 2011 and 2012, in that time captaining the Wildcats to finishes of 10-3 and 11-2.
K-State’s 11-1 regular-season finish in 2012 and share of the Big 12 Conference championship rivals 1998 as the best campaign in program history. Still, compared to the highlight-reel play of Johnny Manziel — whose freshman-year exploits at Texas A&M helped bring an SEC at the height of its dominance into a modernized era of offense — and the too-cinematic-to-be-real story of Notre Dame’s Manti Te’o, Klein faded into the background in Manhattan, New York.
Klein’s workmanlike consistency as a quarterback shined in Manhattan, Kansas, however, separating him as arguably the face of K-State football’s definitive era. If he can inspire similar consistency from new generations of Wildcats, Klein can shape another defining era in the Little Apple.
At an introductory press conference last December, K-State athletic director Gene Taylor joked about the obvious nature of Klein’s return to Manhattan after two years as Texas A&M offensive coordinator, calling it “the worst kept coaching secret in America. Everybody knew we were going to hire this guy before I did.
“If I hadn’t landed the Collin Klein plane,” Taylor quipped, “You guys would have run my ass out of town.”
Truly, there may not be more of a fit between a coach and the identity of his program anywhere in the sport than at K-State — which is noteworthy given how rooted in a single name K-State football has long been.
It may be surprising for those born in the 1990s or later, but for the majority of its football program’s existence, K-State football was dreadful. Wildcats teams from 1912 through 1989 posted records better than .500 17 times; 14 of those predate World War II.
Upon Bill Snyder’s hire in 1989, however, K-State squads finished on the wrong side of .500 just 10 times. Three were in Snyder’s first four seasons, building the program up from moribund depths, two came under the brief yet disastrous tenure of proto-meme Ron Prince, and one was in the COVID-impacted 2020 season under Chris Klieman.
For the better part of 30 years, K-State has been a model of consistency. With the majority of that consistency coming as a result of Snyder’s guidance after almost 80 years of ineptitude, K-State might also be the power-conference program most singularly synonymous with one person.
Again, that’s not intended as a slight — this time, toward the former Wildcats coach Klieman. Proving he could successfully follow in the footsteps of a legend once before, continuing North Dakota State’s dominance of the FCS after Craig Bohl left for Wyoming in 2014, Klieman did so again succeeding Snyder in 2019.
Klieman leaves to Klein a program that won eight-plus games in five of the preceding seven seasons and that in 2022 claimed K-State’s first conference championship since the aforementioned 2012 squad.
With the 2022 title, Klieman won as many league crowns as Snyder in each of his predecessor’s stints. Klieman’s time in Manhattan before he retired last year was undeniably successful, but the aura of K-State remains wholly intertwined with Snyder.
Snyder’s legacy in turn is the standard Klein is tasked with upholding. At the same time, Klein brings with him the potential to take K-State places its never been.
The Wildcats’ 2022 Big 12 championship came with Klein coordinating an offense that rushed for almost 210 yards per game, pounding opponents into submission with a physical, multifaceted approach.
Last season at Texas A&M, Klein helped the Aggies to their first College Football Playoff appearance with an offense that produced 260 passing yards per game. Klein’s adaptability as a coordinator follows the evolution of K-State under Snyder, which could win as much playing ground-and-pound ball with Klein behind center as it did riding the big arm of Michael Bishop in 1998.
And, in both 1998 and 2012 — as well as 2003, 2022 and perhaps other seasons in K-State’s last 30 years — the Wildcats would have played for a national championship in the current format.
Returning to Manhattan with playoff coaching experience at just 36 years old sets the Klein era off in an intriguing direction. For as consistently as K-State has produced for three-plus decades, access to a national championship might eventually be the plot point that gets Collin Klein his entry into the Netflix documentary catalog.
