Inside the Tent: Nebraska 45, Kansas 35

Opportunity Wasted!

FROM THE HEARTH ROOM
You take the best team in KU football history and return nine of 11 starters on defense and the best quarterback in school history with the greatest arsenal of wideouts I've seen in blue. You go into battle in possibly the weakest BCS division in the nation with a middleweight frontrunner one-trick pony that happens to be your most hated rival. And now, by losing to a year-one Bo Pelini Nebraska program that bottomed out last season, you've created a scenario where beating Texas and the bumblebee freaks from Columbia still nets a division title and another trip to the Big 12 Championship for the black and yellow. It's in Kansas City, so they might as well bring their fire engine, cannon, white rocks and stuffed animal parade. Unless Nebraska actually throws a game against KSU or Colorado, the University of Kansas football program will have allowed Missouri to claim division titles in back-to-back years when they were the one team that could have prevented it.

Let me speak for the Jayhawk Football Nation ... and I'm talking about the real Jayhawk Football Nation -- blue warriors that were at the game in Columbia in 1996 when Glen Mason and the team did a no-show or Senior Day vs North Texas or any of the occasions when KSU hung 60 plus on the Jayhawks in Lawrence. For those fans, let me just say, "we are disgusted."

PLUS
It could be a benefit for recruiting. Playing time available at the d-line, o-line and linebacker positions ... and of course, the help wanted sign is always hanging out for the secondary. Prinz Kande -- we love you.

MINUS
I may have already detailed the one big minus in the hearth room section above, but there's more.

1) Phil Steele was right, right, right, right and I really wanted to the Jayhawks to take his preseason mag and shred it.
2) Can't play in the heat, can't play in the cold. Body language said it all in the first half.
3) 1968 lives on.

WORLD VIEW
KU's football program is still a year-to-year yo-yo as it has been for almost a century. Still, if a down year is a low-level bowl and playing in November for a division title, then we are moving forward. Recruiting continues to improve so we'll see what the future Jayhawks can do as that young talent develops. Keep sawin' wood.