K-State faces mammoth task in replacing Snyder

	Bill Snyder has a record of 135-68-1 at KSU. Darren Carroll/SI

How quickly things change in the life of a college football coach. Less than two years ago, on Dec. 6, 2003, Bill Snyder was celebrating the crowning achievement of his already-illustrious tenure at Kansas State. His Wildcats had just stunned 12-0 Oklahoma, 35-7, in the Big 12 championship game in Kansas City to earn his school's first conference title since 1934. K-State would finish that season 11-4, its sixth 11-win season in a seven-year span.

But in the two seasons since, Snyder's team has plummeted from the top of its conference to the bottom of a weak division. Following Saturday's 27-25 loss to Nebraska, which doomed the Wildcats to their second consecutive losing season and last-place North Division finish, the days of 11 wins in Manhattan, Kan., feel as if from another era. And so, it's not altogether surprising that Snyder, 66, apparently taking the recent slide as his cue, has decided to retire.

Whoever succeeds him will face the unenviable task of getting a suffering program back on track. That will be a walk in the park, however, compared to what Snyder pulled off in turning one of the sport's longest laughingstocks into a decade-long powerhouse, which is why these past two seasons shouldn't detract from the coach's considerable legacy.

In the list of college football's all-time greatest turnarounds, you've got to put Bobby Bowden's transformation of Florida State, once a girls school, into a perennial national-title contender at the top. What Howard Schnellenberger and his successors have accomplished at Miami is a close second.

Snyder comes in right after that. When Snyder arrived from Iowa in 1989, Kansas State was the losingest program in Division I-A, with a record of 206-509-41. The Wildcats had gone winless each of the two seasons before his arrival -- and 2-9 and 1-10 before that.

K-State went 1-10 again in Snyder's first season. A year later, however, the 'Cats improved to five wins. A year after that they went 7-4. Then, in Snyder's fifth season, K-State did what at the time seemed unthinkable: Win nine games and make just the second postseason appearance in school history, a trip to the Copper Bowl.

And Snyder was just getting warmed up. It would be the first of 11 consecutive bowl appearances for the Wildcats, including a Cotton and two Fiesta bowls. Along the way, K-State became a fixture in the national polls, coming within a hair of playing for the national championship in 1998 (an overtime loss to Texas A&M in the Big 12 title game spoiled an undefeated season), and became synonymous with tough defenses (ranking in the national top-six in total defense every year from 1999 to '03) and electrifying stars, like quarterback Michael Bishop and tailback Darren Sproles.