Grading Collin Klein to Kansas State: Ex-Wildcats Quarterback a Great Coaching Fit

After Chris Klieman’s abrupt retirement, the program moved swiftly to name the former player as his replacement.

Former Kansas State quarterback Collin Klein will now lead the program as its head coach. / Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images

Seemingly every year there’s a surprise retirement or dismissal that is understandable when you look back. 

That appears to be the case at Kansas State, where Chris Klieman made the eye-opening move to retire after the Wildcats’ season wraps up—all just a few weeks after passionately describing the pressures a head coach faces in the job after his team lost a heartbreaker at Utah. 

While Klieman’s swift exit could have been an unsettling departure to the program, the Wildcats had a perfect replacement lined up in former quarterback Collin Klein. One of the most well-known players of the past two decades, the former Heisman finalist was not only an excellent player in the Little Apple, but also an assistant coach for some of the team’s most recent high points (including a Big 12 championship in 2022).  

dark. FREE. SI College Football Newsletter. Get SI's College Football Newsletter

Klein turned into a hot name on the coaching carousel this year thanks to the work he’s done guiding Texas A&M into a playoff contender and elevating quarterback Marcel Reed. Though he’s just 36, he looks like a perfect fit at his alma mater based on that recent track record and could be key to getting back to meeting those high expectations around Manhattan, Kan., in a very winnable Big 12. 

What it means for Kansas State

You almost have to belong to another generation to know how bad the Kansas State job once was and what a miracle it was for longtime architect Bill Snyder to have done what he was able to do. That’s one reason why the Wildcats value somebody with knowledge of the place. In order to succeed, a head coach has to overcome and deal with some of the shortcomings present, given the school’s location and reliance on talent development over of talent acquisition.

Though Klieman was not a member of the Snyder coaching tree, he was cut from the same cloth and had an impressive amount of success with the team over the course of the last seven years, even with things changing around him quickly in terms of the transfer portal and NIL/revenue sharing.

In hiring Klein to be Klieman’s successor, the school smartly navigated having a link to the past in nabbing a former player who knows the place as a recent assistant while also handing over the reins to somebody who can move the place forward. Klein didn’t leave a few years ago for College Station, Texas, simply because he received a bigger paycheck but because he knew he had to see what a high-functioning operation was like at the highest levels of college football and to test himself in a different league. 

The lessons he’s learned from that time with the Aggies—and under an excellent program builder like Mike Elko—should serve Klein well moving forward as he tries to modernize Kansas State without straying too far from the program’s roots. That can be a tough needle to thread sometimes but it’s hard to find a better fit and easy transition than this for the school in what could have been a tricky situation. 

What it means for Collin Klein

Kansas State is a special place for Klein, and Klein is a special name around Kansas State. It’s not often that a coaching career results in both of those paths intersecting, but luckily things worked out in the end for all involved with this move.

Klein has been on a number of athletic directors’ lists as he’s made a meteoric rise up the coaching ranks. There was some thinking around the industry that he would likely get his own program sooner rather than later with an eye on returning to the Little Apple. That timetable seemed to be accelerated by quite a few years with Klieman stepping down but all seems to have worked out as it should. 

Now there’s no question that taking over a Power 4 program in your first head coaching job is not the easiest thing to do, especially at a place like Kansas State, but if anybody would appear to be equipped with navigating that in both the short and long term, it’s Klein. 

Final Grade: A-

It’s hard to find a better fit to take over for a retiring head coach late in the process than landing a rising assistant coach who is also a program legend. Kansas State isn’t the most effortless of jobs but if anybody can tackle it, it would be Klein.

---

More College Football from Sports Illustrated

Listen to SI’s new college sports podcast, Others Receiving Votes, below or on Apple and Spotify. Watch the show on SI’s YouTube channel.

feed