Kansas drops to 1-1
There were some very high hopes for this Kansas team coming into the season. Those hopes aren’t entirely dashed, but there will certainly need to be some improvement from this year’s Jayhawks if they want to sniff the Big 12 Championship game. Poor play calling combined with an uneven game by Jalon Daniels took a winnable game against Illinois and turned it into a 23-17 loss.
Kansas largely dominated the first half, at least defensively, but managed to enter halftime down 13-10 due to a late pick six thrown by Daniels on a telegraphed screen pass. It was Daniels’ second pick of the night, and there would still be another.
The Jayhawks had quite a bit more trouble stopping the Illinois offense in the 2nd half, with the Illini pushing through some weak tackles and taking advantage of soft coverage from the KU secondary. This combined with 4 total turnovers for the game allowed Illinois to chew the clock, extend their late lead to 6 while forcing Lance Leipold to use all his timeouts in the process. Daniels had the ball knocked away from him on the game’s final play, as he attempted a Hail Mary.
This game was sloppy and I could devote an entire separate post to new OC Jeff Grimes’ playcalling, but for now it’s hard to feel much other than disappointment. Kansas largely outplayed Illinois and cleaning up even a portion of the sloppy play could have changed the outcome. This is still a team with formidable talent, but we now probably need to see how they play over the next couple of weeks to determine if there’s a problem bigger than just what happened tonight.
Kansas plays again at Children’s Mercy Park Friday night, hosting 2-0 UNLV.