It's weird that people think we're a 9-win kind of program. We're a 7/8-win program with a chance at 10/11-win season every 3-4 years when our recruiting classes fall out just right. At best.
If the Big 12 were continuing with the 12 teams and division play, then 9-win seasons are an acceptable expectation with LHC Bill Snyder. You get your 4 freebies from the non-con, then you should be able to go 5-3 most years. Most years you should be better than at least 3 teams in the North, and then you need to pick up 2 wins out of the 5 remaining games. Not unreasonable with LHCBS, right?
With the new conference format, who knows how it will play out and what a reasonable expectation should be.
But back to the quote above. Part of the reason people are pissed is that this year should have been one of those chances at a 10/11 win season and a run at the conference championship. Big 12 is way, way down. We should have been competitive versus Nebraska and Mizzou. We should have defeated OSU at home.
We weren't in a position to do that because 5 years ago, and again 2 years ago, LHC Bill Snyder decided he was bigger than K-State. Coming off a 2003 conference championship, he allowed his assistant coaches to get lax and squander any momentum that should have been gained. Recruiting went downhill. The team on the field failed to execute like it should have. For crying out loud, they let the long snapper hike the ball to an invisible punter standing in the OU endzone.
When the AD told Snyder he needed to make changes for the good of the program, Snyder decided he was bigger than K-State and that he would retire instead of making changes that were obviously needed.
When the Ron Prince Experience came to its explosive end, K-State had a chance to acquire a coach who knows how to defend the spread, who is a part of the K-State family (not something I personally require but that a lot of our fans seem to want), and whose team is now contending for national championships. But at this point, Snyder once again put his interests ahead of K-State's, decided he wanted a second crack at going out the right way, and got back into the game.
To be fair, Snyder probably felt like this was in K-State's best interests, and an opportunity for him to restore the program to where it should have been had he made the appropriate personnel changes at the end of his first tenure. It started off okay...he was going to get young, hungry assistants who could recruit and had the energy to get the program winning again. Other top head coaches were going to funnel assistants and recruits our way. Andy Ludwig and Vic Koenning were good starts. Then Ludwig arrived at MHK, claimed his baggage, and immediately got on an outbound flight. Koenning gave us a year before hightailing it to Illinois, and suddenly, here we are again with the Assistant Coach All Stars who let to Snyder's first retirement.
Of course, those recruiting leads never really materialized (except for the transfers, which are good), so in a year of great opportunity, we were left with 2 QBs who, if combined, could make a pretty good starter, a small, slow-ish, not particularly intelligent defense, and those fantastic assistant coaches to whip it all into shape.
People who are upset with what looks to be an 8 win season are upset because, when taken in the macro view, it could have been much, much more. They're afraid that 8 wins will cover what are some serious deficiencies in coaching and playing personnel, so changes won't be made and the end result will be that we're back to where we were at the end of Snyder's first tenure: great years are not 10-11 wins; they're this year: 8 wins. Average years are 5-6 wins.
Hopefully, this time around it's different. Cosh gets demoted and a new DC/HCIW not named Sean Snyder is brought in for next year. The offensive recruits pan out and some defensive recruits are found and acquired. Given where we're at, that's about the best we can hope for, and with the right HCIW, it may give us a pretty good shot at laying the groundwork for a solid program long-term.
