Opinion: Prince needs to be shown the door
Michael Ashford
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
I took a trip back in time this past Saturday.
I know time travel is impossible, but as I watched from my seat in Bill Snyder Family Stadium as the Texas Tech Red Raiders obliterated Kansas State, I couldn’t help but sense that I was watching K-State football circa 1987.
Sadly, for me and all Kansas State football fans, this atrocity is very much here in the present.
The Kansas State football program is in a state of disrepair just five years removed from winning the Big 12 Conference championship, and the man responsible for such a drastic downfall needs to be shown the door.
Ron Prince, now in his third season as the successor to the legendary Bill Snyder, has taken a program that had risen from the depths of the college football world to become one of its most successful programs in the 1990s and early 2000s and smashed any resemblance of its once rock-solid foundation.
To put it bluntly, Prince doesn’t belong as a Division I head coach, and this season is exposing that very fact.
Prince came from a program in Virginia that had experienced marginal success under Al Groh, whom Prince constantly credits as his mentor. Prince was an assistant coach at a weak BCS school for less than five years before he smooth-talked his way into the job as K-State’s coach, and as K-State fans are now painfully finding out, Prince talks a good game, but he has shown little ability to coach one.
Prince might have succeeded had he been humble enough to hire assistants that had the experience he lacked and the knowledge necessary to field a competitive Big 12 program. But Prince, being arrogant, hired friends and cohorts from college football afterthoughts like Cornell, South Dakota State and Hofstra, thinking his master plan was good enough to overcome his staff’s shortcomings.
Instead of surrounding himself with able recruiters and savvy instructors of the game, Prince hired a bunch of no-names who failed to upgrade the talent in Manhattan in a perceptible way, all the while creating a team that has become fundamentally weak, emotionally neutral (as Prince likes to call it) and visibly unconfident.
I’ve met Prince. I’ve sat down with him and interviewed him several times. He is a fantastic speaker, and he will leave you impressed. But dig deeper — or in my case, review your interview tapes — and you will find that Prince speaks in grandiose coach-speak and delivers these nuggets of wisdom with a “holier-than-thou” sting to them. He can say a whole lot without saying a whole lot.
His attitude has rubbed many K-State fans the wrong way since the day he was hired, while the others he suckered into believing he was a good choice for the job — myself included — are now realizing they’ve been duped by a snake oil salesman posing as a college football coach.
Watching Texas Tech — and Louisiana-Lafayette the week before — tear through the Wildcats left me with a pit in my stomach that I had never felt before. I’m not old enough to remember the days before Bill Snyder, but oh how I remember the glory days under Snyder, when K-State football was a fast, physical, aggressive, fundamental, hard-nosed, hard-hitting, quick-strike football team.
K-State football under Snyder was everything Prince promised it would be under his own watch, but after the debacle at Snyder Family Stadium last Saturday and after three seasons of watching K-State go from decent to bad to downright awful, you’d have an easier time finding similarities between Prince’s squad and the Stan Parrish-led teams of the late ’80s than you would with any of Snyder’s teams.
This is especially true on the defensive side of the ball, where the Wildcats are schematically and fundamentally flawed.
The harshest comparison I could make would be one all fans in this area could remember. Ron Prince is K-State’s version of Terry Allen, the completely inept Kansas football coach who preceded Mark Mangino.
Kansas State football is in need of a change, because if Ron Prince is allowed to further his destruction of the Wildcat program, it might take nothing short of the second coming of Bill Snyder himself to lift the program back up again.
Comments
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Posted by ratdog (anonymous) on October 8, 2008 at 2:27 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Amen!
Posted by jnewell (Jesse Newell) on October 8, 2008 at 2:33 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Ouch.
Posted by neighbor (anonymous) on October 8, 2008 at 4:22 p.m. (Suggest removal)
"it might take nothing short of the second coming of Bill Snyder himself to lift the program"
And the return to playing nobody teams that improved Snyder's record.
Posted by UsayULoveGod (anonymous) on October 8, 2008 at 5:40 p.m. (Suggest removal)
They recruit too much from out of state both schools KU and Kstate , They need to have more Players from Kansas on their roster!!
Posted by trashman (anonymous) on October 8, 2008 at 6:07 p.m. (Suggest removal)
You might remember that the cupboard was almost bare
when Prince got here and Quit picking on my Alma Mater
Cornell- they don't compare I agree, but they don't offer
scholarships to jocks either!!!!
Posted by eiggohp (anonymous) on October 8, 2008 at 8:09 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Give Prince a chance.....after all he has to try to fill the footsteps of "god".
Posted by KSUQueen (anonymous) on October 9, 2008 at 8:29 a.m. (Suggest removal)
I'm sorry, Neighbor, but I do remember us beating the "best football team ever to walk on the field" in 2003 to win the Big 12 Championship. And I also remember us playing USC and beating them. Non-conference teams made up only 3, maybe 4 of the schedule while the rest were Big 12 teams.
And Eiggohp, why are we the only team in the country that has to now settle for less than average play? Why can other programs demand and expect their newly hired coaches to continue at the level that the fans are used to? No, not Kansas State, we are supposed to sit around and hope, HOPE, that Prince can bring us back to what we once were. I'm sick of that mentality.
Posted by slvrnblck (anonymous) on October 9, 2008 at 9:46 a.m. (Suggest removal)
I think KSU and Prince are on the bubble. He/they have got to start winning some games. Take nothing away from Tech, they are very good and have a maybe the best offense in the counrty that constantly puts pressure on you. However, this is Prince's 3rd year and taking a step backwards is not a good sign. They are going to have to beat some Big 12 teams and the rest of their games are all iffy. Hopefully they will beat A&M and Iowa St. but the rest of the lineup is rough...CU, KU, OU, MU and NU....they will be lucky to win one of those.
Posted by cmpbp (anonymous) on October 9, 2008 at 12:56 p.m. (Suggest removal)
I was sent this article by a KU fan. I don't read the Gazette, but I can tell you that you have it almost completely pegged to the point. Congrats. I do remember the old days. Yes this team is clueless with no ability to be coached into better performances.
He will lose out this season. Wefald will defend him because part of Wefald's legacy will be his affirmative action hiring. I don't think arrogance has a race nor does coaching have a race. So let us do the correct thing, as you stated very well, and get a coach in here.
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