Mark Mangino, Bob Stoops and Jim Leavitt walk into a room.

It’s not a joke, just the roots of three future head coaches growing at the same time in the same place. All three spent early portions of their careers as assistant coaches at Kansas State under now-retired coach Bill Snyder.

During 16 years in Manhattan, Snyder’s Wildcats played in 11 straight bowl games thanks in large part to the best assistant coaching staff this side of Hayden Fry. After all, Snyder was once an offensive coordinator for Fry’s Iowa Hawkeyes, so of course he understood the importance of piecing together a first-rate staff.

Five current D-I coaches served under Snyder in his time as a Wildcat. His coaching legacy has spread across the country, from Mike Stoops at Arizona to Leavitt at South Florida, and several places in between.

On Friday, two of those former coaching mates will face off for the second time in two years.

Mangino and Leavitt don’t talk every day — college coaches don’t exactly have a lot of free time — but Mangino said he still had a bond with his fellow assistant coaches.

“Any time you have a relationship or friendship with somebody that you worked with somewhere, you want those guys to do well,” he said. “Late in the evenings, when we get home after our game, you look at the scroll at the bottom of the television and check out all your friend’s scores.”

Mangino has said that Saturday was his day to reap the benefits of the week’s hard work, and that included taking some time to sit down and watch a friend’s game.

“If you play an early game and they play a late game, you watch it,” Mangino said. “And vice versa. If we’re playing a late game and somebody that I worked with and have been in the trenches with are playing, I’ll watch a little bit of it before I get into my pregame routine.”

Kansas’ coach remembers Leavitt as an intense figure both on the practice field and in the film room. Not a lot has changed in that department, as Leavitt is often hoarse during media interviews from yelling at his team.

In 1989, Fry gave Leavitt his first chance at coaching as a graduate assistant at Iowa. One year later he moved on to join Snyder’s staff at Kansas State.

He stayed there five years, four of those working side-by-side with Mangino, then left to start a football program at South Florida. Leavitt said he knew that his team in Tampa Bay wouldn’t go anywhere if he didn’t hire the right guys around him.

“There are a lot of great coaches out there and they just need an opportunity,” Leavitt said. “When they get an opportunity, if they’re smart, they understand that they were part of a good staff earlier and they better assemble a good staff because it’s so critical.”

Snyder laid out the perfect road map for building success at a downtrodden program, but Mangino said it was more important to learn how to write your own map than how to follow another one.

“There are so many things that are different that you can’t just say, ‘OK, I’m going to run up and take this blueprint from this program and apply it here,’” Mangino said. “You’ve got to find your own way, you’ve got to understand what the hurdles are, where the challenges are, what the limitations are, and then design your program within those parameters.”

Mangino, Leavitt and Bob Stoops took notes during their time in Manhattan as each has turned around a struggling program — in Leavitt’s case, a nonexistent one. While these coaching minds were being forged, Leavitt and Mangino said none of them had time to think about the future.

“A lot of us were just a bunch of young guys, working hard trying to stay employed,” Mangino said. “Nobody had time to sit back and think about, ‘Well, maybe I’ll be a head coach someday,’ or ‘When will that happen?’ Heck, you’re trying to win games, get a paycheck, take care of your family and just keep at it.”

Said Leavitt, “In those days, you don’t know about that kind of thing. You just try to do what coach Snyder tells you to do and be on time.”

College coaches don’t generally like to look back, but Mangino said every now and then he liked to reflect on his early coaching years.

So many programs have felt the effects of a coach from the Bill Snyder school of football, and in some cases that effect is a conference or national title. Success breeds success, and championships don’t fall far from the coaching tree.

“The way things have worked out,” Mangino said. “It’s been awesome for a lot of guys.”