Kansas Football Blog-Rock Chalk Jayhawk-KU - Hawk Digest-Kansas Football

FROM THE HEARTH ROOM
This was one of the more compelling chess matches I've watched in a while. Of course, Bob Stoops started with a few more pieces on the board, but it was still impressive the way they set up the KU defense. Once you saw OU running the ball, you knew we'd have to play straight up and that's a pretty good challenge against a talented squad like the Sooners. Essentially, after halftime, OU made the right adjustments and leaned on an overmatched KU outfit. Clearly, OU is a cut above at this point in the season, but the separation isn't quite as wide as the real score of 45-24 would indicate. The usual issue of pass rush versus secondary coverage was in plain site for all of the world to see, but there are two things that I feel were unacceptable yesterday:

1) Tackling at the line of scrimmage. Definitely an issue of playing against talented athletes and later on fatigue, but you played the gaps right most of the game but failed to bring down the ball carrier. That opened up the playbook for a dangerous offense.

2) The wideouts failiure to get separation from the OU DBs in the second half isn't a positive trend. I saw some of that in the USF game as well.

PLUS
If you can bury this game and maybe beat up a Red Raider Pinata (from Mack Brown's Pinata website) to get fired up for a homecoming win over Texas Tech, the path to the Big 12 championship is clear. Mizzou is not as bad as they've looked the last two weeks, but our schedule is going to have us fully prepared for that matchup.

MINUS
I guess the jury is still out on whether or not we can play at the "A-level" in college football with our talent set on the defensive side of the ball. They're not that far off, but we'll have to wait to see if the Jayhawk D learned anything from playing the best this Saturday. Fortunately, we have some top level talent headed into Lawrence over the next month that will give us the opportunity to see if this crew can step forward.

WORLD VIEW
We're 0-2 in big games this year, but they were both roadies. As a complete homer, I felt like we could get a winning record in the five mega-games this season (USF, OU, Tech, UT, MU). At this point, I'm sweating it a bit. Sure the toughest one is out of the way, but I don't like the 0-2 start as we all really wanted to silence the critics. We're off the radar now, so I guess the thing to do is take that and utilize it as the positive that it can be.