Washington, Kansas State have managed to turn things around

Not every program that was struggling in 2008 is running out of Tucson with its fan base on fire.

You think things were bad at UCLA when Rick Neuheisel took over?

While the Bruins were tinkering with a 4-8 team, and trying to contextualize a 59-0 defeat at Brigham Young, Washington was spiraling toward the 0-12 abyss in Tyrone Willingham’s last season.

The Huskies opened the year with a 44-10 loss at Oregon and closed with a 48-7 defeat at California.

In between, Washington lost, 56-0, to USC; 55-14, to Oklahoma and star quarterback Jake Locker to injury.

How were things possibly going to get better?

Kansas State was similarly lost in Ron Prince’s third season after he replaced Bill Snyder. The school Snyder had raised from doormat to national power was back as a front-porch throw rug.

Prince posted his second straight 5-7 season in 2008. Three of the five wins were against North Texas, Montana State and Louisiana-Lafayette.

Kansas State allowed 50 or more points in crushing losses to Texas Tech, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska.

Bad things, though, don’t have to last forever.

Washington and Kansas State enter Saturday games as two of this season’s biggest surprises.

Washington is 5-1 for the first time since 2001 and 3-0 in league for the first time since 1997. The Huskies broke into the polls last week after a 52-24 win over Colorado and on Saturday night are in a prime-time Pacific 12 Conference showdown at Stanford.

Is Washington really that good?

The Huskies barely escaped Eastern Washington, 30-27, and needed a goal-line stand to hold off Cal, but momentum is no longer swimming upstream.

Something is working. It started with Washington firing Willingham and replacing him with USC assistant Steve Sarkisian.

Washington has won nine of its last 10 games dating back to last year and, most surprisingly, the quarterback play has not dropped off despite losing Locker to the NFL.

Keith Price has been remarkable, entering the weekend rated fifth nationally in pass efficiency. Price has 21 touchdown passes and only four interceptions.

“Our perception’s changed, I guess, of who we are,” Sarkisian said this week.

Sarkisian, in year three, says the program is back on track.

“I like our brand of football,” he said. “I like the way we’re playing.”

No one can say for certain why some coaching changes click and some don’t. It’s part of college football’s mysterious murkiness.

Neuheisel seemed the right pick for UCLA at the time. Sarkisian was the reach — he had never before been a head coach.

Washington’s story isn’t over. Sarkisian is 0-2 against Stanford and quarterback Andrew Luck. Stanford won two years ago, 34-14, and last season pitched a 41-0 shutout.

“They don’t run a bad play, and that’s because of him,” Sarkisian, a former quarterback, said of Luck.

Kansas State turned it around by turning back the page, coaxing Snyder out of retirement after Prince’s 5-7 in 2008.

Snyder inherited the worst program in America in 1988 and slowly created the “Manhattan Miracle.” He got the Wildcats to the brink of a national title in 1998 but retired in 2005 after finishing 5-6.

After going 13-12 the first two years of his second act, Snyder leads a 6-0 team into Kansas on Saturday.

Kansas State, like Washington, has received fortuitous bounces. The Wildcats squeaked by Eastern Kentucky, 10-7, in the opener, and have won their last four games by a total of 19 points.

Confidence, though, like failure, is contagious.

Snyder is 72 but hardly a caretaker. He still puts in 16-hour days and maintains a compulsive attention to detail. He barely eats during the season and is almost never seen outside the office.

“I wouldn’t say he’s a gremlin,” former wide receiver Taco Wallace recently told Thayer Evans of Foxsports.com. “But I would say he’s like one of those mythical creatures that you only see every blue moon out. You know, like the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot. People get a glimpse of them or something, but they’re not quite sure if it was him.”

Snyder hasn’t changed. He still won’t look past the end of his nose and hands out praise like Manhattan-hole covers.

He says his team is playing “well enough to win.” He says, “I think we need to be more prominent than we have been.”

He says, “There is good and there is not so good.”

There is also the reality of Kansas State likely meeting its schedule-maker in the coming weeks against Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas A&M and Texas.

There is no denying, though, that Washington and Kansas State have made significant forward progress since 2008.

UCLA can’t say the same. And it’s really hard to say why.

chris.dufresne@latimes.com