K-State Slate: 9.25.14 - Bring on the Miners

Content, content, content! If you're behind on your BotC reading, here's what you need to catch up on:

BracketCat brings you Week 4 of our own crowd-sourced Top 25 poll, which reflects plenty of Big 12 bias and consensus at the top, and Luke Thompson catches up with The K-State Collegian's Adam Suderman in the latest installment of Bring on the Podcast.

As always, Luke joins Jon Morse to bring you the Wednesday FEPO outlook.

It's time to move on from the Auburn loss and focus on this Saturday's game with UTEP. That was the message coming out of Vanier, as Bill Snyder and the players put the loss behind them.

As noted in the Slate comments yesterday, Morgan Burns will likely play against UTEP, but Mike Moore is out for the season and will seek a medical hardship.

Athlon previews the contest with UTEP. This is the first meeting between the two teams since 1999, when K-State won 40-7.

Dakorey Johnson had a great game against Auburn, motivated by three words: "Do my job." That commitment turned into a Big 12 defensive player of the week award for Johnson, after just one career start.

We discussed this in the Slate comments section yesterday. Tyler Lockett is getting attention, but unfortunately, it's mostly for his ineffective cradle catching, and his inability to really bust loose this season.

In more worrying news, the ESPN(blog) crew notes that Jake Waters was hurried nine times against Auburn and in those situations, K-State netted about 15 yards. That is not going to work against the meat of the Big 12 schedule, so our line play needs to improve. A lot.

Waters is aware of the things that went wrong in the last game, and wants better red zone production.

The Auburn game was noteworthy in at least one sense: it was the first time ever that K-State was credited with zero penalties.

At his weekly press conference, when asked by the ills plaguing football these days, Snyder reiterated that it's important to do the right things, on the field and off. You can read a transcript of his comments here.

And now for some editorial commentary. We've been talking about ESPN a lot the last few days. Opinions may differ, but the one thing that we've never really talked about is ESPN's journalistic integrity. Maybe that's because it isn't a particularly open question anymore. Certainly, ESPN did not help matters when the network suspended Bill Simmons for criticizing Roger Goodell. Never has it been more obvious that ESPN's primary role is to entertain, and it cannot succeed in that role without the implicit approval of its biggest show, the NFL.

Don't forget to catch the Week 5 storystream for all your UTEP news and notes.

The equestrian team is off to a hot start this season. As noted in Kelly McHugh's SE piece, the early success is the result of hard work by K-State's underclassmen-heavy roster. The team hosts No. 9 New Mexico State and South Dakota State this weekend.