Kansas State Football: Meet the New Staff – Cory Patterson – Running Backs

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Biography

Now that all the basketball nastiness is settled, it’s time to turn our gaze back to the upcoming football season. Spring practice begins on March 26th, and there will be a plethora of new faces on the field. Some of the new faces will be running through the drills, and some will be running them.

Running backs coach Cory Patterson will be one of the new faces putting his position group through their paces. I know I’m getting old because this is the second “Meet the Coach” article I’ve written about Coach Patterson. I wrote the first one in 2023 when he was named Associate Head Coach / Wide Receivers coach at Purdue under Ryan Walters. Needless to say, that didn’t work out for the Boilermakers, but that’s water under the proverbial bridge.

In fact, if you’re looking for a twinkle of light in the rank, fetid darkness that was the Ryan Walters era at Purdue, Cory Patterson and the wide receivers may be the lone bright spot.

Originally hailing from St. Louis, Missouri, Patterson played football at Lindenwood University before a leg injury ended his playing career. Coach Patterson returned to St. Louis with an accounting degree to start his life in something other than sports, but the corporate accountant couldn’t shake the football bug. Volunteering as a youth football coach pulled him back into the sport. One thing led to another, as things often do, and he decided to hang up his abacus to devote himself to coaching full time.

If you’re looking for someone in it for the love of the game, look no further. Coach Patterson left a corporate accounting gig to take a job as an assistant football coach (and I’m going to assume teacher of some sort?) at Christian Brothers College High School in his hometown of St. Louis from 2009-2012. As a “retired” (read: I tapped out) teacher/coach myself, I can assure you this was a step down in pay grade, and probably a step up in time commitment.

After honing his craft at Christian Brothers, Coach Patterson made the jump to Trinity Catholic High School, also in St. Louis. His first two seasons at Trinity were spent as the offensive coordinator, his next three as head coach. He led the team to a 27-6 record in his three seasons at the helm, including appearances in the Missouri state semi-final and final. After the 2017 team season, he had made enough of an impression and reputation in the high school ranks to merit a call from then-Illinois head coach Lovie Smith, who offered him a job as the tight ends coach for the Illini.

While the Lovie Smith experiment in Champaign ended with a thud, Coach Patterson was so well-regarded that he was retained by Bret Bielema and moved to running backs coach when the former head hog took over the program. The Illini backs thrived under his leadership. Running back Chase Brown rushed for over a thousand yards in back-to-back seasons, including the 2022 season, where Brown ran for 1,643 yards and was both an All-American and a finalist for the Doak Walker Award. You can find Mr. Brown in Cincinnati on Sundays now, starting for the Bengals.

After the 2022 season, Coach Patterson made the ill-fated move of following Illinois defense coordinator Ryan Walters to Purdue, but instead of coaching running backs, he moved to wide receivers. I didn’t understand why Coach Walters decided to turn an elite running back coach into a wide receiver coach at the time, but now I understand it was because he had no idea how to run a program. In his first year as a college-wide receiver coach, he helped develop Deion Burks into a Second Team All-Big 10 selection, thus allowing Deion to escape the clown show in West Lafayette for Oklahoma. In his second and final season at Purdue, he did the same for H-Back/Tight End/Wide Receiver Max Klare, helping develop him into a player good enough to transfer to Ohio State.

The Walters tenure at Purdue was humanely euthanized for the good of the Boilermaker faithful and, on a broader scale, humanity, after the 202hy season, and Coach Patterson headed to Stillwater in 2025 for the death rattles of the Mike Gundy era. The head mullet got chopped three games into the season, after a 69-3 loss to Oregon was followed by a 12-19 home loss to Tulsa, and can I just say how disappointed I was when Oklahoma State fired Gundy? Don’t get me wrong, he deserved to get das boot, but it could have waited until the end of the season. We were deprived of so many epic Gundy crash-out press conferences last season; it doesn’t seem fair. Anyways, much like at Purdue, Patterson’s only fault in the fiasco was hitching his wagon to the wrong horse, but his time in Stillwater was not wasted. The lone bright spot of the Pokes offense, running back Rodney Fields Jr., averaged 5 yards a carry over an injury-shortened 9-game season. Fields Jr. played well enough that Coach Patterson decided to smuggle him out of Stillwater when he was named the running backs coach at Kansas State.

Why Kansas State?

Coach Patterson has been on a coaching roller coaster the last three seasons, and not one of the fun roller coasters. I’m talking about the nightmare kind where you’re strapped into the seat, know the track is broken, and are powerless to stop it.

He can wake up from his coaching nightmare on Coach Klein’s staff.

In return for offering coaching terra firma, Kansas State gets a key to St. Louis…both Missouri and Illinois. One of the things that excited me about Ryan Walters, before I saw him coach, was his ability to recruit St. Louis and East St. Louis. Turns out, that was all Coach Patterson.

At Illinois, he had the benefit of bringing in guys he coached and developed at Trinity Catholic, including first-team All-Big Ten selection and current New York Jet Isaiah Williams. That vein of talent was played out by the team he made it to Purdue, but the connections remained. He helped the Boilermakers raid the roster of a state championship-winning East St. Louis, Ill team. If Purdue is better this season, and lord knows they couldn’t be much worse, it will be, in part, because of some of the East St. Louis players like Smiley Bradford, Jesse Watson, and Jojo Hayden that Coach Patterson brought to West Lafayette.

Kansas State has several 2027 offers out to high school recruits from St. Louis and the surrounding area. I’m not sure those will pay off this season, but it’s clear from those offers that Coach Klein wants to open up that fertile recruiting ground for the Wildcats, and Coach Patterson will most likely be his primary recruiter for that area moving forward.

In Summary

Coach Klein wanted to a solid developmental coach, and he also wanted to get a foothold in St. Louis recruiting.

Cory Patterson is a solid developmental coach with strong St. Louis ties, in desperate need of a competent head coach.

Seems like a good fit to me.

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