Coach Bill Snyder looked beleaguered in Saturday's postgame press conference.



Bill Snyder’s response stopped suddenly as if he was about to make a stark admission of guilt. He paused after saying, “Well, I don’t know if the ship …”

The question from GoPowercat.com’s D. Scott Fritchen started a postgame press conference following Kansas State’s 51-14 loss Saturday at No. 8 Oklahoma. Fritchen wondered about “righting the ship” with the Wildcats facing a “myriad” of issues.

It was the perfect question at the perfect time. Snyder, a coach who always has an answer and yet says much and so little in response, was caught searching to stay in the character he publicly extends to the media and public.

He continued, “Well, I’ll have to reinvest some time in trying to find out if the ship has ever been in this condition before. I’m not sure that it has. I can’t tell you that I’ve got the immediate answer. We’ll work at it. I know that.”

Saturday’s game was a mismatch, a rout that the score did not honestly reflect because OU coach Lincoln Riley called off his potent offense, electing not to pummel the literally defenseless Wildcats into utter humiliation.

K-State looked much closer to the feeble program Snyder took over in 1989 than the one he built into a power that won a pair of Big 12 championships. The last one came in 2012, and six seasons later the slow erosion is obvious. Snyder’s castle is collapsing in decay.

The program he constructed by always “getting a little bit better” every day — and it worked — is now getting a little bit worse every year, even if the records don’t always accurately reflect that. The work Snyder did in coming out of retirement in 2009 to retake the program after a reckless and bizarre three years under Ron Prince, is slowly being undone.

Four years after coming out of retirement, Snyder’s Wildcats won a Big 12 title in 2012, adding to the historic crown the Cats earned in 2003.

It may seem odd to an outside observer to claim Snyder’s program has fallen upon hard times considering the five seasons after that title averaged eight wins. In hindsight, though, those seasons were piecemeal works of coaching genius by Snyder, who is adept at sewing scraps into a quilt of success.

With the Wildcats at 3-5 (and tied for last in the Big 12 at 1-4), Snyder is holding this season’s scraps in his hands and facing the reality that his best sewing job over the season’s final four weeks will only construct a disappointing result. The more harsh reality is this team may lose more than it wins over the next four weeks, and even going 2-2 in those game falls short of a bowl bid.

Snyder gets it, though. He knows what’s taking place goes well beyond a record. And on Saturday the look on his face told the story even better than the words.

The K-State team that took the field Saturday in Norman, Okla., was ill-prepared, dispassionate and physically overmatched by a program his Wildcats climbed over in the 1990s to become first a Big Eight contender and then a national power.

By the fourth quarter, trailing badly, Snyder’s team ran the ball, not to add points to the board, but to devour the clock so they could go home. It was a humbling admission.

“Oklahoma was a better football team than we are, yes,” the 79-year-old Snyder said, in a dramatic understatement.

The program Bill Snyder built from nothing into something to be feared by the late 1990s, and then rebuilt into one of the Big 12’s best after coming out of retirement, is visibly slipping and even the Wizard of Beating Odds was not sure he had the answers.

It’s a truth that many beyond the walls of Coach Snyder’s office have come to realize. He came back to calm the waters. He came back to leave the program in a better state than he did following his first retirement in 2005.

The waters that were calm now churn, and the program he loves so much may be exactly where it was when he returned in 2009. Or about to be in worse shape. That’s a painful reality for anyone who respects Coach Snyder to face, but not as difficult as this one …

It’s time for Bill Snyder to retire. This is a job for a younger man with fresher ideas and the same fire in his eyes and boundless energy Snyder possessed when he arrived in Manhattan in December of 1988.

Those words have been shared on message boards and social media after every loss for many seasons, but now they are being openly expressed by the same donors who paid for the shining new facilities that were built to help the next coach carry on Snyder’s miraculous work and drive the program into the new era of college football.

Now donors are watching the value of their investment dwindle as the state of the program falls back toward what they hoped to never again witness.

“K-State fans have always been great,” Snyder said. “They’ve been supportive. They were there when we were a terrible football team and a terrible program and they’ve been there through the good times, and I would encourage them to understand that those will always return.”

And also understand this: Another coach will lead the return to the good times. Whether or not that next coach is off Bill Snyder’s coaching tree doesn’t seem to matter at this point. It’s time to let Gene Taylor, the athletics director K-State hired for this moment, do his job.

And it’s not about this one loss. It’s about the state of the program. The pool of talent it running dry, and Snyder’s antiquated recruiting practices will not allow the program to catch up.

That’s an important distinction because wins may await on the schedule. K-State travels next weekend to Fort Worth to play a TCU team that just lost at Kansas. KU also comes to Manhattan in two weeks leading up to games with Texas Tech and Iowa State, teams that are clearly better than Snyder’s Wildcats and yet beatable.

Truth be told, this is the only way this story was ever going to end. Snyder always possessed the right answer, the magic elixir to heal a wounded team and raise the college football dead, so don’t blame him for believing too long that he had all of the solutions all of the time.

He doesn’t have all of the answers, and the man who sat at the postgame podium Saturday in Norman, Oklahoma, appeared to have come to that realization.

The college football world will never forget what Snyder did at Kansas State for it was considered impossible. Now, the longer he stays, those in the K-State fan base — be they seven-figure donors or those who cannot afford tickets to watch games inside the stadium that bears Snyder’s name — begin to wonder what it matters if the coach many honor as a king is allowed to squander the vast football riches he promised to leave for the future of the kingdom.