‘We got embarrassed’: Chris Klieman stunned after Kansas State’s ugly loss at BYU

The Kansas State football team has suffered through a few humbling losses under head coach Chris Klieman, but most of them have come with an asterisk.

Until now.

BYU ran away from K-State for a 38-9 victory on Saturday at LaVell Edwards Stadium and handed the Wildcats their most lopsided loss since they played through the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

Klieman had no excuse.

“It was kind of stunning to see that,” Klieman said. “That’s what we talked about in (the locker room). We’re going to find out what these guys are made of, because we got embarrassed. That has not happened here, with the exception of the COVID year, but we got embarrassed tonight.”

Klieman’s team was indeed on the wrong end of some blowouts during the 2020 season. Texas destroyed the Wildcats 69-31 on senior day. Iowa State beat them 45-0 in a rare Farmageddon rivalry game that wasn’t competitive. But K-State was missing dozens of key players for those games. The results could be explained. Plenty of weird scores popped up everywhere that season.

Alabama also whipped K-State 45-20 at the Sugar Bowl in 2022, but that was understandable because the Crimson Tide can do that to anyone.

This was different.

K-State entered this game with an undefeated record. It was ranked inside the top 15. And it was favored to beat BYU by a touchdown, despite traveling across the country for a late night game in front of 64,201 rowdy fans. Many expected the Wildcats to start 4-0 for the first time since 2012 when they went on to win a Big 12 championship. Instead, they failed to score a single touchdown and dropped their conference opener.

“We just shot ourselves in the foot too many times,” K-State quarterback Avery Johnson said. “We have got to score touchdowns and we have got to take care of the football on the road if we want to win games. We didn’t do that tonight. ... We have got to be more fundamentally sound.”

This game got away from K-State when it committed a string of terminal errors immediately before and after halftime.

Believe it or not, the Wildcats were outplaying the Cougars and leading 6-3 late in the second quarter before Klieman’s squad imploded.

Here’s what went wrong: First, DJ Giddens lost a fumble and BYU safety Tommy Prassas returned the loose ball for a touchdown. Next, Johnson threw an interception and BYU immediately scored a touchdown on offense. Then Johnson threw another pick and BYU scored another touchdown on offense. Finally, BYU sophomore Parker Kingston returned a punt 90 yards for a touchdown.

Just like that, K-State went from leading 6-3 to trailing 31-6 in the span of 6 minutes, 25 seconds of game action.

Johnson, who completed 15 of 28 passes for 130 yards and two interceptions, blamed himself for many of those errors.

“Whenever they have all the momentum on their side, we have to do a good job of getting the momentum to swing back to us,” Johnson said. “Obviously, I threw an interception and that didn’t help the momentum at all.”

Klieman had a different opinion.

But there was nothing he could say to make sense of this type of loss.

“Everything was probably in good shape with two minutes left in the half, and then it snowballed and we couldn’t stop it,” Klieman said. “I told the guys after the game, once that two-minute mark hit we didn’t play well in any phase. We can throw everything at myself and Avery, which is fine. We’ll take that heat.

“But we didn’t play well anywhere. We didn’t play well on defense in the second half, didn’t play well on special teams, didn’t block very well, didn’t do anything well in that second half. Credit BYU. We told them they weren’t going to beat themselves. We had to beat them. And instead, we beat ourselves.”