Nick Toth hasn't been here long. He arrived at the Vanier Family Football Complex, looked at the indoor football practice facility, checked out the football field — a football field he played upon in 1997 and coached upon in 2011 — and the former Air Force safeties coach drew an emphatic conclusion.
You notice the eyes first, piercing, narrowed when he discusses his stints at three Power 4 schools over the last 10 seasons, most recently at Texas A&M, and now as Kansas State's Director of Strength and Conditioning. Jeremy Jacobs and the weight room is like Schroeder and his piano. Jacobs has been at other football programs — LSU, Duke and Texas A&M — and spent the past two seasons as the Associate Director of Football Strength and Conditioning/Director of Football Applied Sports Science at Texas A&M, serving on the same staff as new K-State head coach Collin Klein.
Jeremiah Johnson, a native of Scandia, Kansas, remembers the two-hour drives southeast to Manhattan for summer coaching clinics at Bill Snyder Family Stadium. A 2000 graduate of the University of Kansas, Johnson also remembers Kansas State's dominance on the gridiron.
He's a Texas A&M alum who faced the purple and white as a player and then as a member of the coaching staff, and later he served as defensive coach for four years at Kansas, but today, after a 36-hour whirlwind trip to see current Kansas State players, Jordan Peterson wears a purple quarter-zip with a silver Powercat and a gray cap that reads "CATS" as he sits at a table by Bill Snyder Family Stadum.
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