Seriously, what the hell was that
I don’t see much reason to write a traditional recap for yesterday’s game. If you’re reading this, I’m pretty sure you know how it played out. But now that the team is 1-3 and it’s still a little early to talk basketball in depth, I’m interested to hear fans’ opinions on what’s going wrong.
There are lots of things to choose from. The coaching staff coaches so scared it hands opponents a chance to come back. Saturday afternoon, Kansas went up by 11 with 5:39 remaining. It was a good spot to be in, as long as they didn’t let West Virginia do one thing: score a quick touchdown. What did they do? Put their safeties 15 yards off the line of scrimmage and had the corners give the receivers a big cushion. I get that the idea is to prevent the big play, but in the process the defense allowed a bunch of sorta big plays instead, and the Mountaineer scored in about two minutes. They hadn’t had a single long distance scoring play the whole game, so it seems like maybe just playing defense could have been effective. Instead they blitzed only once and played soft coverage, allowing that coverage to be picked apart with ease.
The offensive playcalling isn’t off the hook either. I’ll admit Grimes had his best game at Kansas so far, but like the defense the offense went ultra-conservative instead of trying to move the ball and pick up first downs. On the 3rd and 4 that swung the game, Grimes dialed up a run to the short side of the field against a defense with 8 men in the box, selling out to stop the run. The way Kansas had moved the ball in the second half, it was another infuriating decision to go away from what was working and instead play into the opponent’s hands by making things easy on them in the pursuit of avoiding a big mistake.
Jalon Daniels played his best game of the past three weeks, but he’s not free of blame either. The 1st quarter pick was once again due to him not reading a defense, and he had several throws to open receivers that he flat out missed. I will defend JD6 a bit here, as he deserves credit for making several beautiful sideline passes while on the run, something he’s still good at and that Grimes might want to have him do a little bit more. He also had a couple of nice runs and kept some plays alive with his agility. That said, he didn’t have a great day and continues to struggle in areas where he never did before.
So, RCT commenters, where do you place the blame for both Saturday’s result, and the horrible start overall? Are there more factors I didn’t mention? This is your chance to let some anger out and just complain while playing Monday morning QB. What are you most mad about with the Kansas football program today?