The main reason Kansas State football grew and flourished under coach Bill Snyder’s 17-year guidance was Bill’s Siamese Twin relationship with president Jon Wefald. Will the new coach be blessed with the same angel on his shoulder? If he isn’t, can KSU rebound with a winning season?

For a long time, the most obvious reason for Snyder’s historic 136-68-1 record was the old slogan: “What Bill wants, Jon gets.” Sure, good recruiting, terrific assistants, steadily improved infrastructure and great management from the head coach – but the key item was constant drive and backing from the president’s office. Will Wefald make such a commitment for the new regime? Can there ever again be such a one-on-one link in Manhattan?

Don’t be surprised if a similar tie emerges, unless Wefald leaves. Nobody is more insistent on and appreciative of the merits of such a linkage than The Prez himself, who took over the campus in 1986. Wefald personally helped orchestrate a gigantic miracle.

Before Snyder, who arrived for 1989, K-State was the worst major-college football program in history. Wefald is quick to declare that the Snyder era “reshaped the morale of an entire community.”

“When I got here, there was a sense of futility,” Wefald once told a Sports Illustrated writer covering the Wildcat success story. “If the old administration had stayed on here for three more years, I think football would have been dropped. We would have no marching band, and we’d be at about 12,000 students today.”

Wefald contends KSU’s George and Ira Gershwin duo boosted enrollment, from 1989 on, from 16,261 to the current 23,182; hiked donations from $12.6 million to $83 million; shot royalty income from $32,900 to the current $895,000 or so. Faculty expansion met the enrollment increases, building occurred far beyond the athletic empire, and the Manhattan economy grew exponentially.

There was enormous growth of Purple Pride not only in Kansas but all over the country. Kansas basketball creates and sustains zealots and devotion. So has KSU football spawned a whole new philosophy of achievement. Wefald says it’s Snyder’s doing; in view of the shabby past at KSU, you think it would have happened without Jarrin’ Jon riding shotgun? Not.

Could such an arrangement ever occur at KU? If football is to become the kind of operation the basketball dandies also can be proud of, it won’t happen because of a Robert Hemenway-Mark Mangino alliance like the Wefald-Snyder Corp. Lew Perkins is the conductor of the Mount Oread Sports Symphony. He’s not about to let a mere chancellor get head-joined with his coaches.

Basketball’s Bill Self virtually has a license to steal with his charisma, expertise, phenomenal recruitment and fantastic promise of new glory. If Perkins gets too heavy-handed, there’ll be no effigies hanged. Lew’s image might be the real thing.

Then there’s Mangino, not a Perkins hire. Drue Jennings brought Self here, and Al Bohl hired Mark. Perkins is a famed bottom-liner. If KU loses to Iowa State and winds up 5-6, Lew might have no qualms about bringing in his friend Randy Edsall at Connecticut, whom Lew brought there. There’d be grumbling and howling by Mangino-ites, but Perkins could pull it off.

Yet KU would be starting over – AGAIN! KU and K-State have done that so many excruciating times. Except the last time it really rang the bell for KSU.