Learning From the Experience and Moving Forward

By: D. Scott Fritchen

It was a sight we had never witnessed before simply because Collin Klein, at the place he loves more than any other, has never experienced this exact moment as a head coach at Kansas State. His usual soft eyes at his weekly Monday news conference were hardened by a weekend of individual and team-wide reflection, from rewatching the sequences over and over again on his tablet while sitting on the team plane home to Manhattan after a 31-26 loss at Cincinnati, the first loss and first road trip of the Klein era.

He rewatched the offensive performance against the Bearcats, then he rewatched the defensive performance, until the wheels went down at Manhattan Regional Airport shortly after 2:30 a.m. Sunday. Then he went home and slept for a few hours, helped his wife Shalin with the children as they attended church service as a family, then it was back into the Vanier Family Football Complex, and back to the office he now knows so well, and which on Sunday was filled with frustration and bitterness of a game that slipped away.

"When you fail to accomplish the outcome as a group collectively, it's never fun, and it's never easy, however, it's those adverse times and real-life lessons, albeit painful, that you can learn from the most, and ultimately help shape who you are," Klein says at his weekly news conference. "If you use it like that, in the end of the day, it'll be a good thing for our football program."

K-State is 3-1 overall and 0-1 in the Big 12 Conference and it's immersed in its only bye week of the 2026 season, meaning that the Wildcats, who rolled through the non-conference season with wins over Nicholls (71-3), Washington State (34-7) and Tulane (31-20), are granted a week to mend and continue to build before their Big 12 home opener against No. 20 Houston, 3-1 and 0-1, on October 10 at Bill Snyder Family Stadium. FOX will visit the Little Apple for the 2:30 p.m. kickoff at a stadium that is expected to be filled to capacity while parking lots are sure to be filled with the familiar aroma of freshly grilled meats.

Better believe between now and then, K-State will be cooking.

"The cleansing process for me doesn't really happen until you hit the practice field," Klein says. "Having an experience like (a defeat) heading into a bye week is never fun, but you have to sit on it a little bit longer, and we have to sit on it for another week to stew on it a little bit before we get a chance to go out there and play.

"The exciting part is there's a lot that's in our control and that we can fix and that we're very, very capable of. I know our guys are looking at it like that."

K-State ranks 22^nd in the FBS in total offense (480.3 yards) and 13^th in total defense (246.0). K-State ranks 19^th in scoring offense (40.5 points) and 24^th in scoring defense (15.3). The Wildcats rank top 25 in eight other offensive categories, top 25 in eight other defensive categories, top 25 in three special teams categories, and top 25 in four miscellaneous statistics.

While the collective statistics perhaps demonstrate the strides of Klein's first team one-quarter of the way through the regular season, they do little to douse the pain of a valiant comeback fallen short — a Rodney Fields Jr. 2-yard touchdown run with 1 minute, 15 seconds remaining that pulled the Wildcats to a 31-26 deficit, followed by the task of putting together a potentially game-winning 80-yard jaunt in 45 seconds, which came up empty at Nippert Stadium.

"I went through the tape, and it confirmed a lot of what we already knew," Klein says. "It was a disappointing outcome, and there were some thin margins and some things that we'd like to have back in all three phases, for sure. I was proud of the guys and how we competed and managed the situations we were in, or put ourselves in, accordingly down the stretch and gave ourselves a chance.

"Our team is obviously hurting, and this was a painful experience, for sure. We're very, very confident in their character and in our togetherness to build from this and move forward, and that this will make us better. There are a lot of lessons to be gained from that, for sure."

K-State is back at work after its first loss and its first road game. The Wildcats are hitting practice. They have things to do. Things to conquer.

It's exactly what special teams coordinator Stanton Weber, who came from Toledo after a three-year tenure in which he proved himself to be among the best of his craft in college football, signed up for when he joined Klein, his former teammate and close friend, back at their alma mater, where they learned so much about winning and about life.

"I'm impressed with Collin as a human being in general and as a competitor and head coach, and nothing that was said or done surprised me," Weber says. "That's impressive in itself. It's just the lessons that have been instilled into us by one of the best of how to handle winning and losing.

"The reality is that whether we won or lost that game, we'd still have the same corrections to be made, the same emphases to be applied to our players, and that's exactly what Collin has done. We're never too low, we're never too high. It's onto the next one. We're here to continuously improve."

It's precisely what offensive coordinator Sean Gleeson admires as well. Gleeson joined Klein at K-State after serving as quarterbacks coach at Missouri (2024-25). He also had stints as assistant coach at Northwestern (2023), Rutgers (2020-22), Oklahoma State (2019) and Princeton (2016).

At Oklahoma State, Gleeson oversaw an offense that ranked 17^th in rushing, 21^st in total offense and 35^th in scoring offense. At Rutgers, the Gleeson-led offense had the fourth-best improvement in the FBS by scoring 13.4 more points per game in 2020 than prior to his arrival. Gleeson was a 2020 candidate for the Broyles Award as the nation's top assistant coach.

"I can't say this enough – we have an incredible head coach in Coach Klein who's levelheaded, a great decision maker, and easy to be around from a dealing with adversity perspective," Gleeson says. "He shoulders so much and constructively brings everyone else along with him. I've been around some losses that really sting, and you get home late, and don't sleep much, and have bad feeling in your stomach, and there's a lot of finger pointing. That's not the case here.

"He made about every single decision in the game as a manager of situational football about 1,000% correct in that game and subsequently cleaned up the mess after having a tough loss on the road and met really effectively with the players (Monday) morning and with the coaches where we are pointed in the right direction in light of some things that didn't go our exact way, but we're going to be in a way better form coming out of this thing because of his leadership. Really, that's been the case the entire time I've been here. Every bump in the road we've faced he's handled extremely, extremely well."

And there stands Klein at his weekly news conference, addressing all areas of the team, the ups and downs, and itching to get back onto the practice field. The eyes of the 37-year-old that have seen so much during his career, from that first jog out of the tunnel against North Texas his freshman year at K-State to his brilliant playing career, and on through emerging as one of the finest quarterback coaches, and then one of the brightest offensive coordinators, in college football, saw a team fall just short on a Saturday night in Cincinnati.

His eyes burn with passion and fire and determination. At the moment, they also trace back to that flight back to Manhattan.

"I was already stewing and focused on what we can do to move this thing forward and get better," he says. "I'm a pretty routine guy, and I enjoy that part of it, but it's about us putting our head down right now and getting better."

It's a trait that he learned long ago.

Inside the very same building that he now occupies.

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Rodney Fields Jr.

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