Kansas State is embarrassing itself not to protect basketball, but help football

We’re going about this Jerome Tang thing the wrong way.

This isn’t about basketball, or the lack of a winning team, or hurt feelings or Tang embarrassing a university.

This is about the underperforming football team at Kansas State.

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Because when football isn’t right, nothing else matters. When you’re staring at K-State paying Tang what is believed to be the largest buyout for a coach in college basketball history, the mind immediately moves to where that money could be better spent.

Like, I don’t know, the football team.

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When Chris Klieman decided after last season that his health couldn’t take the unruly state of college football, and that Kansas State wasn’t helping matters by how it approached player procurement for the front porch of the university’s sports programs, he retired and left no doubt why.

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“You guys are smart enough to realize that those who have the most money, have the best players,” Klieman said after K-State’s regular season final against Colorado. “And they’re spending $40-50 million. The ones like us that don’t, man, we’ve got to scratch and fight and claw.”

So K-State accepted the resignation of the best coach it could possibly ask for since Bill Snyder’s second retirement, and hired former Wildcats great Collin Klein.

I don’t think I’m breaking news by saying K-State had to have made significant financial promises to Klein to get him to take the job. You’re not winning at a high level in the Big 12 if you’re not spending, and Klein could’ve waited at Texas A&M until the right job opened at an SEC school.

We now circle back to Tang, who led K-State to the NCAA tournament after his first season in 2023, and then signed a lucrative seven-year extension. The program has struggled since, and K-State has every right to terminate the contract…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/kansas-state-embarrassing-itself-not-010107928.html

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Publish date : 2026-02-17 01:01:00

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