Collin Klein says being considered for Notre Dame offensive coordinator was a 'tremendous honor'

Kansas State shocked the college football world by getting itself into contention in the Big 12 and then actually following through and finally becoming the team to knock off TCU just before the College Football Playoff rankings went final.

And while the win over TCU didn’t derail the Horned Frogs’ playoff aspirations, it did begin to signal what Kansas State is capable of.

What exactly that is, well that’s exactly what offensive coordinator Collin Klein stuck around to find out. Klein was a candidate for the open offensive coordinator job at Notre Dame after Tommy Rees left for Alabama, but the Kansas State coordinator opted to stay put.

“It was obviously a tremendous honor to be (considered), to get that phone call,” Klein said. “But I felt like, again, going through the process, the Lord really put it on my heart that there was still work to do here. My players and knowing that my mission here isn’t done and my guys were really the two things that made me at peace with knowing I was supposed to be here.”

If there’s more to be done, Kansas State could be in really good shape.

The Wildcats scored 32.3 points per game last fall and racked up 418.8 yards per game of offense. And while those figures weren’t eye-popping, there’s a lot that Collin Klein felt like the team left on the table.

And Kansas State’s season was excellent.

The Wildcats managed to go 9-3. And then to top it off, Kansas State upended TCU in the Big 12 Championship Game, claiming the conference’s automatic New Year’s Six bid in the process.

The Sugar Bowl ended up a disappointment against Alabama, but it left Kansas State in a place similar to Klein: with more to prove.

More on Collin Klein

Klein has spent the vast majority of his career at Kansas State, where he also played quarterback from 2008-12. After leaving the collegiate ranks as a player, he very quickly got into coaching.

From 2014-15 he served as a graduate assistant and a defensive quality control analyst at Kansas State. He then spent one year coaching quarterbacks at Northern Iowa in 2016 before returning back to Kansas State, where he’s been ever since.

Klein spent 2017 as the program’s quarterbacks coach, before adding co-offensive coordinator duties to his role in 2018. From 2019-21 he served as quarterbacks coach only, before he added the offensive coordinator title to his role in 2022.

The 2023 season will be Collin Klein’s second as the program’s offensive coordinator.