What are Kansas State Wildcats coaches and players thinking and doing as summer ends and fall begins?
Lured into summer sleep by nightly locusts' lullabies, Midwestern universities and football fields finally wake and stretch in mid-August. The locust buzz is replaced with the busy chatter and hum of moving trucks, bookstore scanner beeps, late-night parties and "how's the team going to be this year?"
Most everybody, especially in football-driven communities, wants a piece of that conversation.
In Manhattan, summer talk about the Kansas State Wildcats is left mostly to vague hearsay. It has been that way for decades -- because of closed practices and limited media exposure -- and in a way has provided for a sort of Purple Christmas in early September for fans as they never really know what gift Bill Snyder Clause has brought.