Of honors and watchlists...

Previously on BotC...

We’re just 42 days from kickoff, and BracketCat counts us down with #42 defensive end Chris Dugan and #43 punter Jack Blumer.

Football

Adam Holtorf has been named to the Rimington Trophy watch list. The award goes to the nation’s best center. Holtorf has started the last 25 games for the Wildcats, and in addition to helping Kansas State finish third in the conference in rushing yards per game (182.6), he is also first-team Academic All Big 12 and first team Academic All-America, and has a perfect 4.0 GPA as an agribusiness major.

As beat writers wrap up their Big 12 Media Days coverage, a few articles about Kansas State continue to trickle in, like this one from The Oklahoman’s Jenni Carlson about Chris Klieman giving up a perfect gig at North Dakota State to take on a tougher challenge in Manhattan.

In more general football news, at Big Ten Media Days this week, Jim Harbaugh offered that student-athletes should be able to transfer once and be immediately eligible to play. This was met with mostly applause, although Harbaugh then muddied the waters by suggesting that players claiming mental health waivers might be making things up just to be able to transfer. Later, Harbaugh offered some clarification:

Harbaugh will always have something to say about everything, but what are our thoughts about his proposal? Is this necessary to make the system fairer to the student-athlete? Will it result in a form of forum shopping by disgruntled players? Discuss.

Basketball

Kansas State assistant Chris Lowery was named to the Southern Illinois Athletics Hall of Fame on July 18. He had a long tenure at SIU, first as a basketball player (1991-94), and later as an assistant coach (2001-03) and finally as head coach (2004-12).

Lowery is the third Kansas State basketball coach to be inducted into the Salukis Hall of Fame, following women’s basketball assistant Chris Carr (2006) and Bruce Weber (2018).

Tennis

Kansas State was named an ITA All-Academic team and five players were named ITA scholar-athletes, including Maria Linares, Meghan King, Anna Turco, Maria Ponomoreva, and Ines Mesquita.

This is the fourth consecutive honor in five years for the school, and is one of six Big 12 schools to earn the honor. The five athletes named to the team were the most for the school since 2015, and second-best in the league, behind only Oklahoma State.

The Eagle Has Landed

Today marks the 50th anniversary of one of the greatest human accomplishments of all time. On July 20th, 1969, Neil Armstrong took “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” as Apollo 11 became the first crewed spacecraft to land on the moon.

The vast majority of us were not yet alive back then, but thanks to that other marvel of 20th century innovation, the Internet, we can experience exactly what live viewers did half a century ago.