MANHATTAN — You'd have to go back a long way to find the last time Chris Klieman faced this much early-season adversity.
Long before he led North Dakota State to four national championships in five years, Klieman coached Division III Loras to a 3-7 record, losing three of four games to start the 2005 season. He stepped down after the season to become the defensive backs coach at Northern Iowa.
Twenty years later, Klieman is in his seventh year leading Kansas State and has started the season with a disappointing 1-3 record, the program's worst through four games since Bill Snyder's first season in 1989, when that lone win felt like the Wildcats had won the Super Bowl.
"It sucks, to be honest," Klieman said. "We all know it does, and now we've got to dig ourselves out of it. There's no reason for me to point fingers. I can get frustrated, but there's no free agency period right now, and there's not a free agency period with coaches. We've got to figure it out."
None of Klieman's NDSU teams lost more than two games in an entire season. Even Klieman's 2020 K-State team, which finished 4-6, started the season 4-1 before losing five straight to end the year.
Not until this year has Kansas State started a year worse than 3-1 through four games under Klieman.
With Big 12 play resuming this week with an 11 a.m. home game against UCF on Saturday, Sept. 27, it's not going to get any easier for the Wildcats.
"There are good football teams out there and we've got a bunch of them that we're going to play, including this week," Klieman said. "Always in this league, you're gonna be in dog fights and it's gonna be a lot of one-score games. We gotta dig deep and find a way to win these one-score games.
"The optimism would say, 'Hey, we've been within a score of every loss we've had,' and that's easy to say. But we're not playing well enough to win those games; we haven't earned those wins. We've earned those losses because we haven't played well enough."
Through four weeks, Kansas State has played uncharacteristically poorly for what many have come to expect from a Klieman-coached team. The Wildcats rank dead last in the Big 12 in running the ball, averaging over 100 yards less per game than they usually do. At the same time, they're struggling to convert on third downs, get stops and slow down opposing ground games.
Klieman will have seven years remaining on his contract at the end of the season, with a near-$30 million buyout, making it likely that he'll be the one who needs to fix the Wildcats for the rest of this season and into the next.
We'll learn plenty over the next few weeks about how Klieman reacts to adversity that he rarely faces.
"Fans, players and coaches are all frustrated because we all feel like we're better than what we're showing," Klieman said. "But you'd better act upon it. Words are one thing, but you gotta act upon it. You gotta go whip that guy across from you in a one-on-one. That's what we're not doing right now."
Wyatt D. Wheeler covers Kansas State athletics for the USA TODAY Network and Topeka Capital-Journal. You can follow him on X at @WyattWheeler_ , contact him at 417-371-6987 or email him at wwheeler@gannett.com
This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Chris Klieman: Kansas State football coach in rough start to season
