Thursday, November 5, 2009
The season hasn’t been good, and everyone knows it. The harder question to answer is why the season hasn’t been good.
Why has Kansas played such underwhelming football thus far, and who is to blame? It is tricky to answer the questions of how and why with any degree of certainty. This makes these questions uncertain.
Perhaps Todd Reesing, injury or no, is to blame. One would expect better play from a third-year starting quarterback— especially as many consider Reesing to be the most productive player in that position in the school’s history. But then again, maybe it’s too easy to lay the blame at the star quarterback’s feet.
Maybe Reesing and Kansas’ barely there running game would have performed better were they functioning behind a more experienced offensive line. However, the offense has still enjoyed a certain measure of success this year. This success makes them hard to blame.
So perhaps we ought to look to the other side of the ball at the secondary or the linebacking corps. There, one will find no shortage of scapegoats. Any member of the secondary not named Darrell Stuckey has moved — either up or down on the depth chart, or into a different position altogether. The linebacking corps is a similar hodgepodge, constructed of players who are either too young, too new to the position or lacking some vital physical trait.
Yet is this the fault of the players? The jumble in the ranks might lead one to blame the assistant coaches. After all, isn’t it the job of the coaches to formulate a coherent strategy, and to recruit players with whom that strategy can be successfully executed? If players are constantly jumbled about, how can they be expected to play well?
Perhaps the buck shouldn’t stop until it reaches the desk of Mark Mangino. The head coach has ultimate control, and thus ultimate responsibility. Yet it seems unlikely that he just forgot how to coach. This is the same man, after all, who resurrected the corpse that was Kansas football.
So where should the blame lie?
Perhaps the only reasonable conclusions are “who cares?” and “why bother?” What is done is done, after all. No amount of finger pointing or demonizing will lift Kansas past Colorado, Oklahoma, or Texas Tech.
No, the only real question right now is how Kansas will react to this taste of adversity. Will the team fold? Will the team cap a disappointing three-game stretch with more losses? Or, alternatively, will Kansas rebound and make a push for the Big 12 North Title? Whatever the case may be, the answer to those questions — and thus, the only answer of consequence — will begin to take shape this Saturday.
— Edited by Brenna M. T. Daldorph
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