The sudden resignation of Zora Clevenger, and the departure of his chief lieutenant Germany Schulz, left a massive hole in the Kansas State Agricultural College athletic department. William Marion Jardine, then-President of the college about whom a small book could be written — he was Secretary of Agriculture under Calvin Coolidge, ambassador to Egypt under Herbert Hoover, president of Wichita State, and has a K-State campus apartment complex named in his honor — turned to the one man presently on campus who could put the pieces back together:
Michael Francis Ahearn.
Since his retirement from coaching, Ahearn had quietly gone about his business as a professor at KSAC, occasionally surfacing in the sports realm as a referee at various contests (some even including the Aggies).