When Bill Snyder started his first year as Kansas State’s football coach, three months before Taylor Swift was born, the Wildcats trailed in their series with Iowa State by 20 games. The Iowa State program as a whole had about 100 more wins than KSU, and perhaps surprisingly, was only 30 losses under .500 — not an impossible climb (7-4 for 10 seasons would’ve knotted it up).
Today, ISU leads the series by a mere three games (after literally fumbling it away last year), and the next meeting will be the 100th. The Wizard of Manhattan has only lost back-to-back games against ISU once. Snyder could win his 200th game next season, making him responsible for just under 40 percent of KSU’s all-time wins.
But there’s a longer-term trap the Cyclones are in danger of: Supplanting Kansas State as the fourth-worst power-conference football team in history, by both percentage and all-time losses.
I started tracking this when ISU was closing in on its 500th all-time victory (and 600th all-time loss). I started with the 2011 NCAA record book (PDF), which for whatever reason is the last that listed every Division I-A team by (official) all-time win percentage. From that list, I took every power-conference team that after the 2010 season had fewer than 500 wins plus Rutgers, which had 600 losses. I then checked each team’s media guide and sports-reference.com to sniff out as many discrepancies as I could and create adjusted W-L-T numbers. From there, and adding statistics up to the present, here’s what I found:
- Northwestern and Washington State now have more overall wins than ISU, and KSU is charging hard.
- Baylor, five games below the .500 mark at the end of 2010, is now 30 games above it. Oklahoma State, four games below .500 at the same time, is now 25 games above.
- Kansas and Kentucky both fell to .500 with losses on Oct. 6, 2012, and have been plummeting since. The previous week, Indiana passed Northwestern to have the most losses of any Division I-A program ever.
- But percentage-wise, no one is going to be catching Wake Forest (.4068) any time soon.
- Florida State, a special case because it did not begin football until 1947, passed Iowa State in all-time pre-adjusted wins in its national championship 2013 season, and then did it officially in 2014.
- Today, KSU and ISU both have 630 all-time losses, with Rutgers one game behind. However, due to more games, the Big Ten’s media-market darling has an all-time percentage of .5050.
The Cyclones lead the Wildcats in win percentage by a mere two-thousandths of a point. If each team repeated last year’s record next year — 3-9 for ISU, 6-7 for KSU — KSU, with one fewer overall win, would lead in all-time percentage by one-ten-thousandth. ISU would be fourth from the bottom ahead of Northwestern, Indiana, and Wake Forest.
At least things are looking up for basketball seas…oh. Or women’s bask…oh.