Team preview: Kansas State

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(All information as of June 20, 2007)

Upon arriving at Kansas State before last season -- his first both wearing the Wildcat purple and as a head coach -- Kansas native Ron Prince shied away, to put it mildly, from any talk about "replacing" former head coach and Kansas State legend Bill Snyder.

Because no coach, no matter how confident in his own abilities, attempts to "replace" the guy whose name is on the stadium where his school's home games are played.

"That word was never in our lexicon. We never used it once," Prince said. "We came in knowing Kansas State had some success at a very high level, at a national level in the past. We just wanted to build from that and continue to field the kind of team that the people of Kansas would be proud of.

"Because of my familiarity with the region, being from around here, I have a pretty good sense of the values of the people around here. I know what they want and what they expect, and that was our initial goal to give them the kind of team they would get behind. We didn't come here to replace anybody."

No doubt Prince and the Wildcats have already made fans of Kansas State proud. More importantly, he's given the fan base good reason to believe that the program's absence from the Big 12 elite will be very short lived.

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