This post sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2011.

From EA Sports:

When you go to a particular school or grow up around college football, you are more than just a fan. It’s who you are. We thought we could leverage this pride in your roots and show that "where you come from" is more than just a statement about geography. By positioning NCAA Football 11 as a game that understands this pride and is authentic to these traditions, the takeaway should be that anything that is in college football is in NCAA Football 11.

And this doesn’t just include game play (though that’s a huge part of it). It’s rivals and mascots; it’s legends and stories. It’s those things that are at the very fabric of the game itself. Of course the game is great this year as well. With authentic entrances, mascots and specific offenses for each team, the term "where I come from" takes on a much larger meaning. While playing NCAA Football 11 is ultimately a great sports sim, it should also give you a sense of the pride and emotion one has for being a fan of a team they will never not be a part of.

This post sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2011.

The general consensus from those who have embarked on preseason prognostications for 2010 is that K-State is going to be bad.  Not just kind of bad, but even worse than the Ron Prince years bad.  I've seen two sources predict a 4-8 season with only one conference win for the Wildcats.

Needless to say, I disagree with those predictions.  It's not that I foresee a triumphant return to the top 25 for Bill Snyder's squad this year, but I definitely don't see the Wildcats looking up at KU, Colorado and Iowa State in the Big 12 North, either.

One notable exception to the rule of those prognosticators who I believe are short selling K-State is Pre-Snap Read's Paul Myerberg.  Myerberg is especially notable because he still remembers how I embarrassingly "eviscerated" his rankings from a few years ago, although it ended up that he was more right than I had hoped he would be.  Let's hope that he doesn't end up being wrong in the reverse direction this time.

Anyway, enough beating around the bush.  K-State has some issues this year at quarterback and linebacker and to some extent defensive line.  Carson Coffman returns from a failed 2009 campaign where he proved ineffective under center and was yanked in favor of fifth-year senior Grant Gregory before Farmageddon I.  He was impressive in the spring game, but that was against the K-State defense's second unit, and if there's anything that's certain about this year's defense -- or team in general -- it's that they have little depth.  Take anything that occurs in the spring game as nothing more than a definite possibility of a firm maybe.  Unless, of course, you're a Nebraska fan and award Heisman Trophies based on the results of a glorified scrimmage.

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This post sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2011.

For this post, I definitely got to K-State too late.  Missing out on the 1998 year meant missing out on what would rank as most K-State fans' favorite team, and not getting around until 2002 caused me to miss out on many of the all-time favorite players.

That said, my years as a K-State fan have provided plenty of memories.  Most of them are the more run-of-the-mill times with your friends, the classic moments that you can't always remember because they're so routine, but they're the things that we vaguely refer to as the time of your life.  There were so many funny and entertaining little moments with folks like mystman995, JSchwarz, and ksubailey that weren't particularly momentous at the time, but later in life are the kinds of things that randomly pop into your head and bring a smile to your face that the other people in the elevator find a little creepy.

Anyway, read on to find out what I consider the most memorable times I've had as a K-State football fan.

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This post sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2011.

At a program like K-State, we rarely see top-rated recruits on campus.  Unlike Texas and Oklahoma, who turn away more four- and five-star players than K-State signs, the players who have gone on to become stars in Manhattan were usually the diamonds in the rough, the borderline three-stars or two-stars that couldn't sniff a scholarship offer from a major football power, but were willing to work their rears off for a demanding coach and get everything possible out of their talent.  As a result, there are a lot of homegrown stars and other underdogs that tend to be the fan favorites.

For me, this decision came down to a difficult decision between two players who fit the previous description.  My choice as favorite K-Stater is Darren Sproles.

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This post sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2011.

College football would be awesome enough all by itself.  Cheering your school on in a packed stadium against a hated rival -- or even a hopelessly overmatched patsy -- is a four-month-long high that we can't get enough of and look forward to the minute it goes away.

But as awesome as college football is, it is enhanced tremendously by tailgating.  Whereas you may be restricted regarding how many of your close friends you can sit next to during the game itself, tailgating gives you the ability to hang out with as many of your buddies as you have chairs for.  It lengthens and enhances the game experience.

We all know that feeling you get when you get into Manhattan on game days.  There's something in the air that tells you "today is not just another day."  And when you get to the stadium and see row after row of cars, trucks, RVs, and every other type of vehicular transportation, with the flags waving and food cooking, you just let the feeling wash over you.  It's game day.

At K-State, we are blessed with a tremendous tailgating scene.  Large blacktop lots on the east and west side of the stadium provide ample parking for those lucky enough to have a parking pass, while nearby satellite grass lots are usually more than sufficient to handle the rest of the crowd.  With everyone packed in so tightly, you can smell the food cooking from a long distance, the sweet combination of ribs, brats, steaks, burgers, hot dogs, brisket, and whatever other dead animals people can throw over an open flame.  There's the good-natured (and not not-so-good-natured) ribbing between the home crowd and the visitors.  Washers clink and footballs fly.  Solo cups "conceal" adult beverages from the wandering eyes of the dreaded Kansas ABC and law enforcement.  The fans mop sweat or bundle up against the cold, depending on the time of year.

I'd like to tell you I have a tailgating routine and traditional setup, but that's just not the case.  It was only last year that I moved back to Kansas City, and I haven't been able to get a routine set up just yet.  In an ideal world, I'd show up about four hours prior to gametime with the BOTC editorial crew and a few other good friends.  Fire up the grill, throw on some food, play some games to pass the time, discuss the team, the matchups, and college football in general, and watch the other big games of the day on a TV with satellite access (yes, that's my ultimate tailgating dream, to have a TV so I can watch the other games while waiting for K-State's).

So that's what I see as K-State tailgating.  What are your traditions?  Favorite recipes?  Best spots?

This post sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2011.

Today, we have input from two writers.

TB:

As mentioned yesterday, I'm not a K-State lifer.  It wasn't until 2002, at the ripe old age of 19, that I became a K-State fan.  So as a result, I wasn't around for some of the best teams to sport the purple and white.

However, I still have been around long enough to have a legitimate favorite among the K-State squads I've seen.  And while I considered giving the nod to last year's squad for the grit they showed, I'm going with what is probably a cliche here: the 2003 K-State squad is my favorite.

It isn't just because this team won K-State's first conference championship since the Wildcats played in the Big 6 that makes this my favorite squad.  And frankly, given that they were the preseason No. 6 team, this squad actually underachieved by "only" winning a conference championship.  It was the parts and personalities that made this team what it was, not to mention the roller-coaster ride they took us on throughout the 2003 season.

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This post is sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2011.

Whenever it comes up in conversation that I run a blog about K-State sports, I am inevitably asked how I got started blogging.  In what is apparently a familiar refrain, the simple answer is that I moved away from Manhattan and missed K-State sports.  After graduating from K-State in 2006 with my degree in journalism, I ventured down to Houston and started law school.  Toward the end of my first year, I was feeling very disconnected from K-State sports.  Sure, I had wildly celebrated the unexpected win over Texas, and kept track of Bob Huggins' first and only season in Manhattan, but other than that, I felt like I wasn't as informed as I'd like to be.

Enter the world of blogging.  It started slow, unsurprisingly, and I remember my shock at seeing 100 hits on my Sitemeter one day when one of my buddy's threw up a link to one of my posts on TexAgs.  Before long, Peter Bean noticed the site, and asked me to fill the vacant K-State sports slot on SB Nation.  Most of you probably know the story from there.

So that's the story of BOTC.  But  the story of how I actually became a K-State fan is a little more interesting.  I'm guessing most of us on here either grew up in Kansas in families that were dyed-in-the-wool purple, or went to K-State and caught the bug there.  Pretty typical for fans of most college sports teams.

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