To be honest with y’all, I’ve never been as down on the entire concept of college athletics as I am at the moment. That sucks, because Kansas State football is on the cusp of, if nothing else, an interesting season. Optimus Klein has returned to his home planet of Manhattantron. If anyone can help the Wildcats navigate the post-NCAA era of college football, for however long it lasts, it’s Kansas State’s conquering hero. Taking a wider view of college football makes me sick to my stomach and forces me to furiously compose 2,000-word articles that should never light up the pixels on your screen. Y’all don’t come here to read mopey articles, and I don’t enjoy writing them. The only way forward I see is to take an extremely narrow view of college football. It’s a scummy world out there, with adults who should know better, preying on college kids, but Kansas State football, to paraphrase Bob Dylan from his Blood on the Tracks album, shelters me from the college football storm. I don’t know what any of this means in terms of competing against teams with unlimited resources, led by folks who have clearly damaged the part of their brain capable of shame, but I can tell you what I think the team is going to look like next season.
I’m going to focus on that.
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Coach Klein’s two seasons as the play caller in College Station, while setting back the Kansas State offense, give us a template for what he’s bringing back home. He was ordering off the top of the menu at Texas A&M. He may not have landed every player he wanted, but he had no problem landing the type of players he wanted for his offense, if that makes sense. He won’t have the same level of on-paper talent next season, but he has been busy bringing in guys that fit his Texas A&M mold.
I don’t want to get bogged down with quarterback talk in the first article in this series, so I’m going to write about wide receivers instead. Here’s Coach Klein deployed to catch Marcell Reed’s occasionally scatter-shot passes.
Texas A&M Wide Receivers
WR 1:
KC Concepcion – 5’11”, 190 – Slot – Wide
Rec: 61 Yds: 919 TDs: 9
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WR 2:
Mario Craver – 5’9”, 165 – Slot
Rec: 59 Yds: TDs: 4
WR 3:
Ashton Bethel-Roman – 6’0”, 185 – Wide
Rec: 24 Yds: 503 TDs: 5
Thoughts
I found this interesting. As I mentioned above, Texas A&M has the resources to go out and get the type of players they want. The fact that their top three receivers are all on the small to extremely small side is intentional. I’ve gone back and watched a few Texas A&M games over the last week, and I recognized these routes because I watched Phillip Brooks run them for Kansas State. Klein had his small, fast receivers running routes across the field, allowing them either to turn the ball upfield by getting the corner on the defense or, on occasion, running out-and-ups where the defense is looking for a receiver to continue dragging across the field, only to have him break vertically and go deep.
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Keep in mind, KC Concepcion was a Freshman All-American and ACC Rookie and Offensive Rookie of the Year at NC State as a freshman in 2023. Craver was a 4* recruit in the 2024 class and a 4* transfer from Mississippi State in 2025, after showing that his 10.74 100-meter high school time carried over to the football field in the SEC. Ashton Bethel-Roman was another 4* recruit coming out of high school with elite track speed who plays bigger than his listed size (247 compared him to former Tennessee Vol and current New York Giant deep ball speed merchant Jaylin Hyatt). These guys were all elite prospects, and that makes it work. If you’re going to sign smaller guys, they need to be elite, but much like Deuce Vaughn, sometimes you can find an elite skill set that’s been devalued in recruiting because they don’t fit the physical mold. It’s clear from his work at Kansas State and Texas A&M that Coach Klein is more concerned about athletic ability and skill set than having a team of slow, jumbo receivers.
That’s not to say that Coach Klein didn’t utilize receivers of the jumbo variety during his time in Aggieland. In 2024, A&M’s leading receiver was 6’6”, 200-pound Noah Thomas, who transferred to Georgia after the 2024 season. If he can find a big receiver with the speed and skill that he’s looking for, all the better, but size isn’t a limiting factor in recruiting.
Kansas State Portal Wide Receivers
Brandon White – 5’9”, 165 – Slot
2025 @ Hawaii: Rec: 38 Yds: 399 TDs: 2
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Josh Manning – 6’3”, 210 – Wide
2025 @ Missouri: Rec: 29 Yds: 318 TDs: 2
Izaiah Williams – 5’11, 175 – Slot – Wide
2025 @ Texas A&M: Rec: 7 Yds: 64 TDs: 1
Thoughts
Brandon White
Let me know if this sounds familiar. Brandon White was an elite high school track athlete with a personal-best 100-meter time of 10.3 and a 6.73 in the 60-meter dash, which broke the Ohio Indoor State Meet record. He may not be big, but he can scoot. I plan on doing more film breakdowns this off-season, because again, everything off the field in college football immediately sends me to the swamp of sadness, but if you want a head start, check out how Klein used Craven on A&M’s first touchdown against Notre Dame.
Klein brings him across in motion, the defender thinks he’s going to keep going for the dump off, but Craven turns it up instead and leaves him in the dust (he’d later go on to embarrass the Notre Dame safety who attempts to tackle him, that’s where the 4* talent kicks in).
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It’s a simple concept, and Klein sets it up perfectly because Craven coming in motion and getting that drop off pass in the flat is a staple of his offense. I’m going to guess the Notre Dame defense back was squatting on that swing pass earlier in the game and decided to let him do the work for him on this play.
Josh Manning
Josh Manning got away from Kansas State the first time around when the Wildcats lost out to Missouri for his signature after Coach Klein headed south. Now, the Lee’s Summit product is correcting a previous mistake: agreeing to both play football and live in Columbia, Missouri (shudders at the thought). While Manning doesn’t have Bethel-Roman’s burst, I see him as the deep threat in the offense. Guess what? He’s also a former track athlete with an 11.15 in the 100 and a 22.21 as a junior in high school. When he wasn’t running track or terrorizing defensive backs, he was playing basketball, which should help him high-point deep balls. He’s another former 4* recruit, with the necessary physical skills to get the job done.
I had to move over the Texas A&M vs South Carolina for this clip, but I could see Manning utilized in a similar fashion.
This is another play where the defensive back expects the Texas A&M receiver to flatten out; he doesn’t, and by the time the safety recovers from his incorrect assumption, it’s too late for redemption. I see Manning, like Bethel-Roman, as the vertical threat in the offense. When you stretch the defense from sideline-to-sideline all game, you should eventually be able to punch a hole in the middle of the field with a vertical route. Manning doesn’t need to catch a bunch of passes for him to be effective in this offense; he needs the passes he does catch to go a long way. He certainly has the physical tools to get the job done.
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Izaiah Williams
Coach Klein didn’t bring many players with him from A&M, but he did manage to lure Izaiah Williams from Aggieland to the Little Apple. Williams was a 4* receiver out of Tampa, Florida, in the 2023 class, and speed is also the name of his game. He has personal bests of 10.94 in the 100 meters and 22.79 in the 200 meters. He redshirted as a freshman in 2024 and then sat on the bench behind KC Concepcion as a redshirt before pulling up stakes. Who better to play the KC Concepcion role at Kansas State than his understudy at A&M? I expect to see him in the slot when K-State goes three-wide and outside when Klein goes to his two-receiver package.
Here’s another sneak peek from the Notre Dame game on how I expect him to be utilized in the Wildcat attack.
That’s nasty business. What you don’t see is Notre Dame’s starting corner going out of the game the play before, and Klein immediately going after his backup with the out and up.
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Again, it’s set up by previous out routes. The Notre Dame corner expects him to keep going towards the sideline, because that’s what he does most of the time, but Klein attacks the backup’s eye discipline. The corner thinks he’s got the out covered, peaks into the backfield, and doesn’t realize Concepcion is about to hit him with the up. Once the corner stops his feet, it’s all over (if I’m the Notre Dame defensive coordinator, I show him the film and instruct him to tackle the receiver and take the 15 yards if that ever happens to him again).
It’s the same concept as the touchdown pass to Craven I highlighted earlier. He turns a horizontal route, vertical and the defense back is completely lost.
Overall
Hey, talking about actual football is fun! I’m going to do this more often. I know Kansas State brought in more than 3-receivers and returns a few, but I would be surprised if the three I mentioned above didn’t play a good bit next season. The portal receivers fit Coach Klein’s offense perfectly, and in post-NCAA college football, there’s no waiting around. It’s all about evaluating talent, extracting as much value as possible from that talent, while also understanding that there may not be a year two. You need to get guys on the field as quickly as possible; otherwise, you’ve dropped a bunch of money developing a player for someone else.
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For example, A&M ended up in a bidding war with Florida over Izaiah Williams coming out of high school. He flipped from the Gators to the Aggies. I’m guessing that wasn’t cheap, but then they redshirted him in 2024 and used him as a deep reserve in 2025. That was the natural state of things at one point in college football, but no more. He’s off to significantly greener pastures (Seriously, College Station is the Kentucky Fried Chicken of college towns; everything is a shade of brown). Shout out to the Aggies for coaching him up over the last two seasons, I suppose. I doubt A&M misses the money, but that’s the sort of thing the Wildcats have to avoid moving forward. They can’t absorb those financial losses as readily as the Aggies.
Ok, I just wrote a paragraph about the wider world of post-NCAA college football, and it feels gross. I’m going to go ahead and stop now before I end up like Artax. I like what I see in terms of portal strategy from this coaching staff, and, in theory, the wide receiver position should be better positioned to help Avery Johnson out this season.
