MANHATTAN, Kan. – Bill Snyder, architect of the greatest turnaround in the history of college football and arguably one of the best college football coaches of all time, announced his retirement today as the head football coach at Kansas State.

Thank you, Coach Snyder.

Warm regards,
Family#ThanksCoachSnyder pic.twitter.com/IasCWTVDVP

— K-State Athletics (@kstatesports) December 2, 2018

The winningest coach in the history of K-State football with a 215-117-1 record, Snyder will transition to a special ambassador role for the University as stated in his current employment agreement.

He will leave as the 20th winningest coach in FBS history and currently ranks second among active FBS coaches in wins. Under Snyder, K-State is the third-winningest program in the Big 12 with 104 total league wins since the league was formed in 1996.

In all, Snyder led K-State to 19 of the school’s 21 all-time bowl appearances, won two conference titles, achieved two No. 1 national rankings, coached players who received a total of 214 All-America honors, 13 Academic All-Americans, was a five-time national coach of the year and seven-time conference coach of the year and also became just the fourth active coach to be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame (2015).

“Coach Snyder has had an immeasurable impact on our football program, Kansas State University, the Manhattan community and the entire state of Kansas, and it has been an honor and a privilege to get to know and work with him the past two years,” said Athletics Director Gene Taylor. “He and his family have touched the lives of so many people, from student-athletes, coaches, staff and fans, and he is truly one of the greatest coaches and leaders in college football history. His impact on college football is unmatched and legacy is one that will last a lifetime.”

Snyder’s impact at K-State reached far beyond the football field. In addition to rekindling an overwhelming sense of pride in K-State alumni and supporters from coast to coast, the winning culture he ushered in helped spark a University and community-wide revitalization as K-State’s enrollment blossomed from 18,120 when he was hired to a record of more than 24,000.

“This university, this community and this state are deeply indebted to Coach Bill Snyder. Since arriving on campus in 1989, coach has delivered on all his promises — and more. He brought Kansas State University football to the national stage and built a program on the bedrock of integrity, honor and his famed 16 goals for success,” said Richard Myers, Kansas State University president.

“He came here, and stayed here, because of the people. He made us a family — a proud purple family who travel in record numbers to watch him lead the Wildcats to victories, bowls and rankings never achieved before. Coach Snyder has always taken the time and care to turn his players into college graduates, community leaders, successful businessmen and leaders of strong families. Bill Snyder is a legend and his legacy is one that K-Staters for generations will value and cherish,” Myers said.

Following a three-year retirement from 2006-2008, Snyder returned to the sidelines in 2009 with hopes of revitalizing a program that he once built, piece by piece, into a national force. And, after nine seasons back in charge, he did just that – and then some.

Over the past 10 years under Snyder, K-State has totaled 79 victories, advanced to eight bowl games, won a conference championship in 2012 and finished third or better in the ultra-competitive Big 12 Conference in four of the last seven seasons.

Act Two of his renowned career started in 2009 when the Wildcats played for a berth in the Big 12 Championship on the last week of the season and went 6-6 prior to a 7-5 campaign in 2010 and a berth in the inaugural Pinstripe Bowl.

K-State’s climb back into the nation picture continued in 2011 as the Cats went 10-3, finished No. 8 in the BCS standings and earned their first Cotton Bowl invitation in 10 years

The bar was raised again in 2012 as Snyder led the Cats to their third conference championship in school history and first since 2003. Kansas State, which won its first 10 games of the season and finished the regular season at 11-1 with an 8-1 mark in Big 12 play, tied the school record for overall wins and conference victories while also ascending to No. 1 in the BCS rankings following its 10-0 start.

Snyder went on to win the Bobby Dodd Coach of the Year Award as well as top Big 12 coach honors for the second straight season following the Cats’ memorable 2012 season that culminated with a berth in the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl and quarterback Collin Klein being named a finalist for the Heisman Trophy.

From 2013-2018, K-State won an average of almost eight games a year and included a 2014 season that saw the Cats ranked once again in the Top 10 and compete for a Big 12 Championship in the final week of the season.

When Snyder was named the Wildcats’ head football coach in 1988, he inherited a team that had just suffered through its second-consecutive winless season and was on a current 0-26-1 stretch. It was a program that had been through 14 different head coaches and won just 24 percent of its games – going 137-455-18 – between Lynn “Pappy” Waldorf’s 1934 Big Six championship team and his hiring.

But it did not take long for Snyder to change the entire culture of the program. In just his third year, he guided the 1991 Wildcats to a 7-4 record to give K-State just its second winning season since 1970. For his efforts, Snyder was named ESPN’s National Coach of the Year.

Just two seasons later, Snyder would guide Kansas State to a 9-2-1 record and a berth in the 1993 Copper Bowl, marking just the second bowl appearance ever by the Wildcats.

The trip to Tucson was the first of 11-straight postseason appearances for Snyder’s Wildcats, who quickly became a fixture on the Big 8/12 bowl circuit.

Along the way, Kansas State would become just the second team in the history of college football to win 11 games in six of seven seasons from 1997 and 2003.

The 11-win campaign in 2003 brought more firsts for Kansas State as Snyder guided the Wildcats to an unforgettable upset of No. 1 Oklahoma in the 2003 Big 12 Championship game that not only gave the Wildcats their first Big 12 title and BCS bowl berth, but captivated the imagination of the nation’s college football fans.

In his first tenure, Snyder guided Kansas State to 11 winning seasons, four Big 12 North Division titles and three Big 12 Championship games as the Wildcats recorded the eighth-most wins in Division I-A from 1993-2004.

In addition to the team accomplishments, Snyder’s players were also some of the most decorated in the country. In his first 16 years, he produced three national award winners, 45 All-America selections and 68 first team all-conference honorees.

The rebuilding effort and subsequent success engineered at Kansas State by Snyder clearly stands as one of the most amazing in all of college football.

A national search is underway to identify K-State’s next football coach. The department will utilize Ventura Partners to assist with the search.

HOUSTON (AP) — George H.W. Bush, a patrician New Englander whose presidency soared with the coalition victory over Iraq in Kuwait, but then plummeted in the throes of a weak economy that led voters to turn him out of office after a single term, has died. He was 94.

The World War II hero, who also presided during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the final months of the Cold War, died late Friday night at his Houston home, said family spokesman Jim McGrath. His wife of more than 70 years, Barbara Bush, died in April 2018.

The son of a senator and father of a president, Bush was the man with the golden resume who rose through the political ranks: from congressman to U.N. ambassador, Republican Party chairman to envoy to China, CIA director to two-term vice president under the hugely popular Ronald Reagan. The 1991 Gulf War stoked his popularity. But Bush would acknowledge that he had trouble articulating “the vision thing,” and he was haunted by his decision to break a stern, solemn vow he made to voters: “Read my lips. No new taxes.”

He lost his bid for re-election to Bill Clinton in a campaign in which businessman H. Ross Perot took almost 19 percent of the vote as an independent candidate. Still, he lived to see his son, George W., twice elected to the presidency — only the second father-and-son chief executives, following John Adams and John Quincy Adams.

The 43rd president issued a statement Friday following his father’s death, saying the elder Bush “was a man of the highest character.”

“The entire Bush family is deeply grateful for 41’s life and love, for the compassion of those who have cared and prayed for Dad,” the statement read.

After his 1992 defeat, George H.W. Bush complained that media-created “myths” gave voters a mistaken impression that he did not identify with the lives of ordinary Americans. He decided he lost because he “just wasn’t a good enough communicator.”

Once out of office, Bush was content to remain on the sidelines, except for an occasional speech or paid appearance and visits abroad. He backed Clinton on the North American Free Trade Agreement, which had its genesis during his own presidency. He visited the Middle East, where he was revered for his defense of Kuwait. And he returned to China, where he was welcomed as “an old friend” from his days as the U.S. ambassador there.

He later teamed with Clinton to raise tens of millions of dollars for victims of a 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean and Hurricane Katrina, which swamped New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005. During their wide-ranging travels, the political odd couple grew close.

“Who would have thought that I would be working with Bill Clinton, of all people?” Bush quipped in October 2005.

In his post-presidency, Bush’s popularity rebounded with the growth of his reputation as a fundamentally decent and well-meaning leader who, although he was not a stirring orator or a dreamy visionary, was a steadfast humanitarian. Elected officials and celebrities of both parties publicly expressed their fondness.

After Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Bush quickly began building an international military coalition that included other Arab states. After liberating Kuwait, he rejected suggestions that the U.S. carry the offensive to Baghdad, choosing to end the hostilities a mere 100 hours after the start of the ground war.

“That wasn’t our objective,” he told The Associated Press in 2011 from his office just a few blocks from his Houston home. “The good thing about it is there was so much less loss of human life than had been predicted and indeed than we might have feared.”

But the decisive military defeat did not lead to the regime’s downfall, as many in the administration had hoped.

“I miscalculated,” acknowledged Bush. His legacy was dogged for years by doubts about the decision not to remove Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi leader was eventually ousted in 2003, in the war led by Bush’s son that was followed by a long, bloody insurgency.

George H.W. Bush entered the White House in 1989 with a reputation as a man of indecision and indeterminate views. One newsmagazine suggested he was a “wimp.”

But his work-hard, play-hard approach to the presidency won broad public approval. He held more news conferences in most months than Reagan did in most years.

The Iraq crisis of 1990-91 brought out all the skills Bush had honed in a quarter-century of politics and public service.

After winning United Nations support and a green light from a reluctant Congress, Bush unleashed a punishing air war against Iraq and a five-day ground juggernaut that sent Iraqi forces reeling in disarray back to Baghdad. He basked in the biggest outpouring of patriotism and pride in America’s military since World War II, and his approval ratings soared to nearly 90 percent.

The other battles he fought as president, including a war on drugs and a crusade to make American children the best educated in the world, were not so decisively won.

He rode into office pledging to make the United States a “kinder, gentler” nation and calling on Americans to volunteer their time for good causes — an effort he said would create “a thousand points of light.”

It was Bush’s violation of a different pledge, the no-new-taxes promise, that helped sink his bid for a second term. He abandoned the idea in his second year, cutting a deficit-reduction deal that angered many congressional Republicans and contributed to GOP losses in the 1990 midterm elections.

An avid outdoorsman who took Theodore Roosevelt as a model, Bush sought to safeguard the environment and signed the first improvements to the Clean Air Act in more than a decade. It was activism with a Republican cast, allowing polluters to buy others’ clean-air credits and giving industry flexibility on how to meet tougher goals on smog.

He also signed the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act to ban workplace discrimination against people with disabilities and require improved access to public places and transportation.

Bush failed to rein in the deficit, which had tripled to $3 trillion under Reagan and galloped ahead by as much as $300 billion a year under Bush, who put his finger on it in his inauguration speech: “We have more will than wallet.”

Seven years of economic growth ended in mid-1990, just as the Gulf crisis began to unfold. Bush insisted the recession would be “short and shallow,” and lawmakers did not even try to pass a jobs bill or other relief measures.

Bush’s true interests lay elsewhere, outside the realm of nettlesome domestic politics. “I love coping with the problems in foreign affairs,” he told a child who asked what he liked best about being president.

He operated at times like a one-man State Department, on the phone at dawn with his peers — Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union, Francois Mitterrand of France, Germany’s Helmut Kohl.

Communism began to crumble on his watch, with the Berlin Wall coming down, the Warsaw Pact disintegrating and the Soviet satellites falling out of orbit.

He seized leadership of the NATO alliance with a bold and ultimately successful proposal for deep troop and tank cuts in Europe. Huge crowds cheered him on a triumphal tour through Poland and Hungary.

Bush’s invasion of Panama in December 1989 was a military precursor of the Gulf War: a quick operation with a resoundingly superior American force. But in Panama, the troops seized dictator Manuel Noriega and brought him back to the United States in chains to stand trial on drug-trafficking charges.

Months after the Gulf War, Washington became engrossed in a different sort of confrontation over one of Bush’s nominees to the Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas, a little-known federal appeals court judge, was accused of sexual harassment by a former colleague named Anita Hill. His confirmation hearings exploded into a national spectacle, sparking an intense debate over race, gender and the modern workplace. Thomas was eventually confirmed.

In the closing days of the 1992 campaign, Bush fought the impression that he was distant and disconnected, and he seemed to struggle against the younger, more empathetic Clinton.

During a campaign visit to a grocers’ convention, Bush reportedly expressed amazement when shown an electronic checkout scanner. Critics seized on the moment, saying it indicated that the president had become disconnected from voters.

Later at a town-hall style debate, he paused to look at his wristwatch — a seemingly innocent glance that became freighted with deeper meaning because it seemed to reinforce the idea of a bored, impatient incumbent.

In the same debate, Bush became confused by a woman’s question about whether the deficit had affected him personally. Clinton, with apparent ease, left his seat, walked to the edge of the stage to address the woman and offered a sympathetic answer.

Bush said the pain of losing in 1992 was eased by the warm reception he received after leaving office.

“I lost in ’92 because people still thought the economy was in the tank, that I was out of touch and I didn’t understand that,” he said in an AP interview shortly before the dedication of his presidential library in 1997. “The economy wasn’t in the tank, and I wasn’t out of touch, but I lost. I couldn’t get through this hue and cry for ‘change, change, change’ and ‘The economy is horrible, still in recession.’

George Herbert Walker Bush was born June 12, 1924, in Milton, Massachusetts, into the New England elite, a world of prep schools, mansions and servants seemingly untouched by the Great Depression.

His father, Prescott Bush, the son of an Ohio steel magnate, made his fortune as an investment banker and later served 10 years as a senator from Connecticut.

George H.W. Bush enlisted in the Navy on his 18th birthday in 1942, right out of prep school. He returned home to marry his 19-year-old sweetheart, Barbara Pierce, daughter of the publisher of McCall’s magazine, in January 1945. They were the longest-married presidential couple in U.S. history. She died on April 17, 2018.

Lean and athletic at 6-foot-2, Bush became a war hero while still a teenager. One of the youngest pilots in the Navy, he flew 58 missions off the carrier USS San Jacinto.

He had to ditch one plane in the Pacific and was shot down on Sept. 2, 1944, while completing a bombing run against a Japanese radio tower. An American submarine rescued Bush. His two crewmates perished. He received the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery.

After the war, Bush took just 2½ years to graduate from Yale, then headed west in 1948 to the oil fields of West Texas. Bush and partners helped found Zapata Petroleum Corp. in 1953. Six years later, he moved to Houston and became active in the Republican Party.

In politics, he showed the same commitment he displayed in business, advancing his career through loyalty and subservience.

He was first elected to Congress in 1966 and served two terms. President Richard Nixon appointed him ambassador to the United Nations, and after the 1972 election, named him chairman of the Republican National Committee. Bush struggled to hold the party together as Watergate destroyed the Nixon presidency, then became ambassador to China and CIA chief in the Ford administration.

Bush made his first bid for president in 1980 and won the Iowa caucuses, but Reagan went on to win the nomination.

In the 1988 presidential race, Bush trailed the Democratic nominee, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, by as many as 17 points that summer. He did little to help himself by picking Dan Quayle, a lightly regarded junior senator from Indiana, as a running mate.

But Bush soon became an aggressor, stressing patriotic themes and flailing Dukakis as an out-of-touch liberal. He carried 40 states, becoming the first sitting vice president to be elected president since Martin Van Buren in 1836.

He took office with the humility that was his hallmark.

“Some see leadership as high drama, and the sound of trumpets calling, and sometimes it is that,” he said at his inauguration. “But I see history as a book with many pages, and each day we fill a page with acts of hopefulness and meaning. The new breeze blows, a page turns, the story unfolds.”

Bush approached old age with gusto, celebrating his 75th and 80th birthdays by skydiving over College Station, Texas, the home of his presidential library. He did it again on his 85th birthday in 2009, parachuting near his oceanfront home in Kennebunkport, Maine. He used his presidential library at Texas A&M University as a base for keeping active in civic life.

He became the patriarch of one of the nation’s most prominent political families. In addition to George W. becoming president, another son, Jeb, was elected Florida governor in 1998 and made an unsuccessful run for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016.

The other Bush children are sons Neil and Marvin and daughter Dorothy Bush LeBlond. Another daughter, Robin, died of leukemia in 1953, a few weeks before her fourth birthday.

___

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — President Donald Trump joined the leaders of Canada and Mexico at a global meeting in Argentina on Friday to sign a revised North American trade pact that he called “groundbreaking” and a benefit for “working people.”

President Trump Participates in the USMCA Signing Ceremony https://t.co/ITeDQ39ZrN

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) November 30, 2018

The U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement is meant to replace the 24-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement, which Trump has long denigrated as a “disaster.”

He appeared with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and outgoing Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto at the Group of 20 nations summit in Buenos Aires for the formal signing ceremony. Each country’s legislature must also approve the agreement.

“It’s been long and hard. We’ve taken a lot of barbs and a little abuse, but we got there,” Trump said of the pact.

Legislative approval is the next step in the process, but could prove to be a difficult task in the United States, especially now that Democrats — instead of Trump’s Republicans — will control the House of Representatives come January. Already Democrats and their allies in the labor movement are demanding changes to the agreement.

While Trump hailed the revised trade pact, Trudeau was more measured, saying there was still work to be done and calling on Trump — using his first name — to remove steel and aluminum tariffs the U.S. imposed on Canada and Mexico. Trudeau also referenced recent downsizing by General Motors in North America as a “heavy blow.” Trump did not mention the job losses.

The signing came at the front end of two days of tough diplomacy for Trump. On the top of his agenda is a Saturday dinner meeting with Chinese President Xi Jingping. which will determine if the two can ease escalating trade tensions. Before Trump arrived in Argentina he injected additional drama into the proceedings by canceling another high-stakes meeting, with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

On Friday, Trump opened the day with a cordial meeting at the Casa Rosada with Argentine President Mauricio Macri, a longtime business acquaintance. Posing for photos in the gilded Salón Blanco, Trump spoke about their longtime personal relationship and said they would discuss trade, military purchases and other issues.

“We’ve known each other a long while,” Trump said, noting he worked with Macri’s father on real estate developments. The businessman-turned-politician joked that when he and Macri first met they’d never have imagined their future roles on the world stage.

Macri is hosting the summit as he struggles with problems at home. He is trying to halt economic turmoil that has caused the steep depreciation of the Argentine peso.

Trump, who arrived in Buenos Aires late Thursday, barreled into the two-day meeting by announcing via Twitter that he was canceling a planned meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin over Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian vessels. His agenda for the weekend includes meetings with world leaders, as well as a number of heavily choreographed group activities for the gathering of leaders of rich and developing nations.

Trump faces a series of diplomatic challenges over the weekend, most notably whether he can strike an agreement with Xi.

The president canceled on Putin not long after his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, revealed he had lied to Congress to cover up that he was negotiating a real estate deal in Moscow on Trump’s behalf during the Republican presidential primary in 2016. The news ensured any meeting with Putin would have put a spotlight on the special counsel’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow during the campaign. Trump has denied any wrongdoing.

Trump showed that the Russia investigation was testing his ability to stay focused on summit business after he blasted the investigation in a fresh tweet on Friday, again calling it a “Witch Hunt!”

One looming question is whether Trump will have a run-in with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman amid global dismay over the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that the Saudi crown prince must have at least known of the plot to kill Khashoggi, who was critical of the Saudi royal family. Lawmakers in both parties have called on Trump to at least avoid the young heir apparent as punishment.

But Trump publicly announced his decision to effectively give the prince a pass in the name of “America First,” making vastly exaggerated claims of Saudi military contracts and investments in the United States. The president also views Saudi Arabia as a vital counterbalance to Iranian influence in the Middle East.

Asked Thursday why the two had no meeting scheduled, Trump said: “I would have met with him but we didn’t set that one up.”

With his “America First” approach, general distaste for multinational deals and habit of insulting allies, Trump typically gets a mixed reception at global gatherings.

Trump has slapped tariffs on the European Union, pulled the U.S. out of the landmark Paris Climate Accord and the Iran nuclear deal and suggested he might be willing to pull the U.S. out of NATO if member countries don’t significantly boost their defense spending.

SEDGWICK COUNTY —The suspect wounded in connection with a Tuesday afternoon shooting is out of the hospital and in jail.

Just before 3pm Tuesday, deputies responded to report of a man later identified as 61-year-old Richard Gore, firing a handgun behind the DCF building in the 3100 block of S. Oliver in Wichita, according to Sheriff Jeff Easter.

At 3:06 pm, law enforcement arrived and spotted the Gore North of the DCF building in a creek area waving a handgun.  Law Enforcement deployed behind cover in different locations and was able to observe the Gore fire at least 4 rounds in the direction of traffic that was traveling on George Washington Boulevard and towards the DCF building, which was open and occupied, along with the DCF parking lot that had an employee next to their car.

Law Enforcement gave verbal commands to drop the weapon and Gore fired two rounds towards the DCF building and then started to swing the weapon towards law enforcement.  At 3:23 pm, a deputy, who was equipped with a Sheriff’s Office issued rifle fired 2 shots at the Gore striking him one time in the shoulder area.

A short time later an S.W.A.T. vehicle was used to approach the suspect and safely taking him into custody.

EMS transported Gore to Wesley hospital and he was treated for his injury.  The suspect appeared to be intoxicated at the time of the incident.  He was released and booked into the Sedgwick County Jail on Wednesday afternoon.

Through an investigation deputies recovered 18 shell casings in the area where the suspect was located and other evidence indicates he had the ability to fire more rounds.  The handgun was recovered as well.  The DCF building was struck along with at least one light pole.  It does not appear that DCF was the target of the shooting at this point in our investigation.

Gore is being held without bond on 5 counts of Aggravated Assault LEO, 1 count of Aggravated Assault and 1 count of Criminal Discharge of a Weapon, according to the Sedgwick County Jail records.

————