Zach Shackleford flips to Texas, Everything is Horrible

Eric was so disgusted by Saturday's outing that he Sunday Slate made it up before his recap. Nobody blames him.

Your pal icfkaa provided a fanshot yesterday linking to the Star/Eagle report from Kellis Robinett: Bill Snyder's trip to Belton, Texas was for naught as Zack Shackleford flipped his commitment to the University of Texas on Sunday. Ken Corbitt at the Capital-Journal also reports, as does Burnt Orange Nation.

This leaves K-State with only 12 signees in the 2016 class still committed as National Signing Day rapidly approaches. Nobody except those who've already figured it out wants to hear this, but the situation is entirely the result of Bill Snyder's failure to commit to being here and the administration -- as a whole -- failing to have a clear succession plan in place. The internal struggle between Snyder's public desire for his son to take over and John Currie's desire to bring in someone else, the uncertainty of Snyder's remaining tenure, and a lackluster performance on the part of Snyder's assistants leaves recruits uncertain as to their own futures if they commit.

And make no mistake, those of you whose first reaction is "You commit to a school, not a coach" -- you're being willfully naive and expecting what should be to be what is. This is now a multi-billion dollar business, which depends on labor whose options are quite literally limited to deciding who will help them achieve their goals.

Not what school. What person. Schools don't prepare you for a football career, and if you want a winning football program you have to be recruiting players who see that as their future. Period. If "they should be coming here for their degree" is your pollyanna-ish belief system, then our alma mater may as well join the Mountain West and stop worrying about what Oklahoma and Texas are doing.

What we're getting at here is that you'd better start getting used to more years like 2015. It's no fun typing those words. It's no fun to ruin people's days, either. All we can suggest is that if you ever thought this site was an adjunct to K-State's cheerleading program, you've taken a wrong turn.

Meanwhile, Corbitt also has bad words for the basketball squad, arguing that the defense is just as much to blame as the incapable-of-solving-zone offense. We'll echo Eric's sentiments from yesterday: blaming the kids for being unprepared is like blaming the teenager at the McDonald's drive thru for your Big Mac having lettuce on it when you didn't bother telling them to leave it off. Once again, faced with a disastrous outing, Bruce Weber takes no responsibility.