Basketball teams in action

The Kansas State men’s and women’s teams will take the court today. The men are at the Sprint Center in Kansas City to take on the Saint Louis Billikens. Tipoff is scheduled for 6 PM CST, and the game can be seen on ESPN+.

The women have a much tougher road, both literally and figuratively, as they travel to Eugene to take on #3 Oregon. This game tips off at 2 PM CST, and will air on Oregon Live Stream via the Pac-12 Network. The Wildcats are without the services of Rachel Ranke and Ashley Ray for the rest of the season, so they’ve had to come up with creative workarounds, including getting Peyton Williams more looks from beyond the arc.

In football news, Joshua Youngblood was named to the Football Writers Association of America (FWAA) All-American squad. He’s on the second team as a kick returner. This is the fifth All-America honor for Youngblood this season, and he’s the first true freshman at Kansas State to be honored multiple times since Tyler Lockett in 2011.

National signing day is still the top football item on our minds. Drew Scheider weighs in with a closer look at Will Howard, a three-star quarterback out of Pennsylvania who has drawn favorable comparisons to Carson Wentz.

Nick Leckey returned to Bring on the PodCats with Luke Thompson and talked about the winning team Chris Klieman and staff are putting together in Manhattan. He remains very high on the program.

In other football news, 2019 recruit Chris Herron has entered the transfer portal. Still listed on the roster as a quarterback, Herron made a brief switch to wide receiver, but that does not seem to have panned out for the team or the player.

Finally, as many of you are aware, legendary Iowa coach Hayden Fry passed away on Tuesday after a long battle with cancer. Among many other career successes, Fry will be remembered as the football coach with the sport’s most impressive coaching tree:

Fry was of course the man who gave Bill Snyder his first shot at coaching Division I football when Fry hired him as an assistant at North Texas. Snyder is still grateful for the opportunity and described his former mentor as a “quality, caring person” and as a man with vision.

In addition to Snyder at Kansas State, the photo above (from 1983) features several future head coaches who would go on to become the winningest coaches at their programs: Barry Alvarez (Wisconsin), Kirk Ferentz (Iowa), Dan McCarney (Iowa State), and Bob Stoops (Oklahoma).