Lincoln Riley is 44 years younger than Bill Snyder. Here are some things as old as the difference between the 2 head coaches.
It’s the FBS’ youngest head coach vs. its oldest.
This is a timeline of related events:
- Oct. 17, 1939: Bill Snyder is born.
- Oct. 18, 1939-Sept. 4, 1983: Nearly 44 years elapse.
- Sept. 5, 1983: Lincoln Riley is born.
- Oct. 21, 2017: Riley coaches against Snyder in a Big 12 football game.
Riley is in his first year leading Oklahoma, having stepped in for the retired Bob Stoops last summer. Snyder is in his 26th season as Kansas State’s head coach, the job he first took before the 1989 season.
On Saturday, the youngest head coach in the FBS will face the oldest in Manhattan (4 p.m. ET, FOX). To mark the occasion, here is a list of people, places, and things that aren’t older than the difference between the two coaches.
The exact time between Snyder’s age and Riley’s is 43 years, 10 months, and 19 days. For our purposes, we are rounding and calling this a 44-year gulf.
People who are just as old as, or younger than, the Snyder-Riley age gap
- Dave Chappelle (44)
- Terrell Owens (43)
- Aaron Boone (44)
- Almost every player in this game, if you multiplied their ages by two (44 or less)
- Jim Parsons (plays Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory) (44)
- Pharrell Williams (44)
- Adrien Brody (44)
- Taylor Hicks (was the gray-haired guy on American Idol) (41)
- Sean Paul (44)
- Neil Patrick Harris (44)
- Tyra Banks (43)
- Seth MacFarlane (43)
- Nas (44)
- Kobe Bryant (39)
- Greg Oden (29)
- Leonardo DiCaprio (42)
- Peyton Manning (41)
- Benedict Cumberbatch (41)
- Also 41 at was Alan Turing, who cracked a whole Nazi code during World War II before dying and being played by Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game more than a half-century later
- Tim Duncan (41)
Events that did not last (or have not lasted) longer than Snyder was alive before Riley’s birth
- The Simpsons (28)
- The Vancouver Grizzlies (6)
- The Thirty Years’ War (30, actually)
- The Second Viking Invasion of the British Isles (32)
- The Trump administration (what feels like only 14 years so far)
- The old Big East Conference (34)
- Enron (22)
- The reign of any British monarch except for George II, George III, Victoria, or Elizabeth II
- The American Basketball Association (9)
- The XFL (1)
- John Isner’s match against Nicholas Mahut at Wimbledon in 2010 (three days)
- AOL Instant Messenger (20)
- The ongoing production of A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, a series of books that still isn’t completed even though they’ve already produced seven seasons of Game of Thrones around its storylines (20)
- Mozambique’s ongoing time as a sovereign nation independent of Portugal (42)
- The Big 12 (23)
The most relevant thing that’s not younger than the Snyder-Riley age gap:
- Snyder’s roughly 55-year coaching career, started in the high school ranks in Missouri in 1962. Snyder had been coaching for 20-plus years before Riley was conceived.