MANHATTAN — As eager as he is to finally get his Kansas State football team on the field for spring practice, Chris Klieman has a number of other things on his mind that are not as pleasant.
Klieman, who is starting his seventh coaching season at K-State, expressed his frustration with the state of college football Wednesday during a news conference ahead of Friday’s first of 10 spring practice sessions.
Off the field, I still think the industry of college athletics is a disaster. It just is,” Klieman said. “Between the lines, I think it’s great.
“During this month of April — not our decision as coaches, not our decision at Kansas State, but the industrywide decision — because of the House settlement, because of different legality things and litigation, we’ve got to remove a lot of kids from the program, and it sucks, I’ll be honest with you.”
While Klieman has a laundry list of complaints, including a second transfer portal window in April, his greatest source of frustration is the NCAA-imposed roster limit of 105 set to take place for the 2025 season pending approval by Congress. For K-State, that will mean trimming roughly 20 walk-ons from the program.
There’s a lot of kids that want to be here, want to stay here, that we can’t have in the program,” Klieman said. “Kids that are paying their way, kids that have put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears in this place. Kids are invested academically.
Now those kids have got to make a choice.”
At the very least, Klieman argued, the NCAA could have phased in the changes.
“It’s frustrating to me because I don’t understand why the number came to 105,” Klieman said. “Why didn’t we kind of slowly bring it down? And I don’t even know who decided it, but as a lot of us coaches talk about it, we’re not in those meetings. We’re not in the rooms.
