Snyder doing his homework on former Big 12 rival A&M
When Bill Snyder found out his Kansas State squad was pitted against Texas A&M in the Advocare V100 Texas Bowl, Snyder admitted he knew little about the Aggies. He said he knew plenty about his own team, and some about every Wildcats opponent in the regular season.
The Aggies hadn’t been on his radar since A&M exited the Big 12 for the Southeastern Conference before the 2012 season.
“Here in the last 24 hours or so, I began to do a little research on Texas A&M,” Snyder said Thursday at an NRG Stadium news conference to tout the Dec. 28 game. “It’s starting to scare me a little bit. … They have a great deal of balance in their offense, and (on defense), they’ve got good size and length, guys who can get up and disrupt passers. They’re a good football team.”
The Aggies (8-4) were slotted No. 4 in the first College Football Playoff ranking in early November before a late-season slide right out of the top 25. The season for Kansas State (8-4) went about the opposite, minus any late consideration for the fourteam playoff.
The Wildcats started 3-3 before winning five of their last six to earn their first matchup with the Aggies since 2011, when both were in the Big 12. Kansas State, which owns a three-game winning streak over A&M, beat all four of its Big 12 opponents from Texas this season: Texas Tech, Texas, Baylor and TCU.
“By and large, we’ve continually made reasonable improvement over the course of the year,” Snyder said. “We still have a long way to go, but we’re a better team than when we started.”
Snyder, 77, is in his second tenure at Kansas State. The first lasted from 1989 to 2005, when he rebuilt what was considered the worst program in the country in the late 1980s, and then starting again in 2009, when he came out of retirement to make sure KSU didn’t slide back to being one of the worst programs in the nation.
“You’re coaching against a legend,” said A&M coach Kevin Sumlin, who will visit with the media Friday at NRG Stadium. “For me, it’s an honor as a coach to be on the same field.”
Snyder said Houston is special to him primarily because of a couple of Kansas State quarterbacks he coached from the area. Michael Bishop, who led the Wildcats to the 1998 Big 12 title game against A&M (an Aggies victory), played at Willis. And Ell Roberson, who led Kansas State to a Big 12 title in 2003, played at Baytown Lee.