Kansas State was the outhouse of college football for most of the 20th century. A .500 season in Manhattan was as commonplace as March sun bathing in Minneapolis. The four seasons before Bill Snyder came to Kansas State, the Wildcats won a total of three games. In 1989, Snyder’s first season, he was 1-10. After that his program took off and Kansas State became a top 20 program and Big 12 Conference champions.
Northwestern and Kansas State had more in common than the nickname Wildcats before Gary Barnett showed up in Evanston. The NU “Mildcats” were always a favorite homecoming opponent and hadn’t been to the Rose Bowl since 1949. The three seasons before Barnett’s arrival Northwestern had won three conference games. Barnett’s 1992-1994 teams were 3-9, 2-9 and 3-7-1, but he preached a “you gotta believe” message. Then came back-to-back Big Ten championships in 1995 and 1996, the school’s first titles since 1936.
Barry Alvarez is the winningest coach in University of Wisconsin football history. The Badgers had won a total of nine football games in the four seasons before he became Wisconsin’s coach. He was a loser in his first season in Madison, going 0-8 in the Big Ten, 1-10 overall in 1990. Two more losing seasons followed and then came a Big Ten championship in 1993. Alvarez took three teams to the Rose Bowl, winning all his games in Pasadena. He won three Big Ten championships.
Hayden Fry stared at a miserable statistic when he started his first season as Iowa’s head football coach in 1979: the Hawkeyes had gone 17 consecutive years without a winning season. After two losing seasons, Fry had Iowa in the Rose Bowl as Big Ten champs. He went on to win two more conference titles, compiling a record of 143-89-6 in 20 seasons at Iowa. By the late 1990s his program had slipped and in 1998 Fry finished 3-8 in his final season. In came Kirk Ferentz, now considered one of college football’s best coaches. His first two seasons he won four games and lost 19. Later came two conference championships within three seasons.
Kansas is a basketball school, right? Not so much anymore. Historically, Kansas has sometimes been about as bad as Kansas State and coach Mark Mangino came into this season with these records: 2-10, 6-7, 4-7, 7-5 and 6-6. Check out the Jayhawks now: 10-0, ranked in the top five in the country and possibly headed to the national championship game.
Even at talent overload and tradition-rich USC, things don’t always start out so hot. In 2001, Pete Carroll’s first season, he lost four straight games, finished with a 6-6 record and had the embarrassment of losing to Utah in the Las Vegas Bowl. Better days, to say the least, followed as the Trojans won national championships in 2003 and 2004.
What all these tales of success come down to is this: Brewster deserves patience and support while he goes about his business. Don’t judge him today. Wait for the results of 2008 and 2009.