College Football

Kansas State Wildcat Football: Brains on field and off

Updated Mar. 4, 2020 6:18 p.m. ET

Fansided, Stan Unruh/FanSided via Jug of Snyder

The mental preparation for a football game is not rocket science but knowing what the coach wants and what is expected on dozens of plays isn’t as simple as it sounds. This brainy group of Kansas State Players is up to the task.

The Kansas State Wildcat football team is safely in Houston for Christmas and preparation for next week’s Texas Bowl. They flew from a newly opened terminal at Manhattan Regional Airport on Thursday.

After wrapping up a successful football season, the players rolled through finals week and can now focus all their attention on Texas A&M. This is a brainy group of players. It does make a difference.

The ‘Cats and their fans can be proud of the team’s on-field accomplishments and their hard work in the classroom.

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We always focus on the their game-day effort. We frequently forget these are student athletes.

When the game is finished and they aren’t in the weight room or preparing for the next opponent, they are studying.

Yes, most of players won’t get a professional football pay check. They will have a job like the rest of us.

For a third-consecutive season, Kansas State led the conference in Academic All-Big 12 players with a school-record tying 29 honorees.

This includes a conference-high 18 on the first team, according to a media release from Kansas State Athletics.

The Wildcats also paced the Big 12 with two players that accomplished 4.0 GPAs in Matt Seiwert (agribusiness) and Zach Reuter (biochemistry).

Seiwert, who earned first-team honors last year, was one of six Wildcats repeating as first-team honorees.

He is joined by linebacker Will Davis, place kicker Ian Patterson, linebacker Trent Tanking, tight end Dayton Valentine and defensive end Tanner Wood.

K-State will have 21 players on its Texas Bowl roster who will already have their undergraduate degree in hand, which ranks third in the nation among bowl teams.

K-State will be playing its 137th game all-time against current members of the SEC, but 107 of those meetings were against either Texas A&M or Missouri as Big Eight/12 foes.

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The AdvoCare V100 Texas Bowl marks the fourth time K-State will face an SEC team in a bowl game.

The Wildcats defeated Tennessee in the 2001 Cotton Bowl, 35-21, and fell to Arkansas in the 2012 Cotton Bowl and 2016 Liberty Bowl.

Additionally, K-State has a pair of SEC teams lined up for non-conference home-and-home series with Vanderbilt (2017, 2020) and Mississippi State (2018-19).