“The opportunity for the greatest turnaround in college football exists here today. And it’s not one to be taken lightly.”
Those words, uttered almost exactly 30 years ago, have gone down in college football history. A spry, confident, 49-year-old Bill Snyder stood at a podium in Manhattan, Kansas and said he thought he might be able to turn around what was almost definitively the worst major college football program at the time. I’m sure there were people in the room who laughed to themselves. But he clearly wasn’t kidding.
Throughout his career, Snyder has repeatedly defied the odds and bucked expectation on his way to staking a pretty substantial claim to the title of greatest college football coach in history, but 30 years takes a lot out of a person, and the 2018 season showed that the Bill Snyder that stood at the podium in 1988 is long gone.