Morning Brew: Fusco on soccer, football and former Kansas baseball player
Soccer coach schedules weaker teams for non-conference play; football fans should perform as well as players; and a former Kansas baseball player misses a chance to play at Kauffman Stadium.
By Asher Fusco (Contact)
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
University of Kansas football coach Mark Mangino laid out a simple lesson plan during last year’s 12-1 romp of a season: Play weak competition; win games; haul in coaching awards. It seems one of his colleagues was taking notes.
After struggling through last year’s lackluster campaign marred by tough opponents and inconsistent offense, Kansas soccer drew inspiration from Mangino in designing its 2008 slate.
Instead of traveling to Hawaii and facing powerhouses such as Portland and California, Kansas scheduled less prominent programs such as University of Alabama at Birmingham and Loyola-Chicago. Kansas coach Mark Francis said he hoped his team could add a few victories to its résumé in non-conference play before jumping into Big 12 Conference play.
“We’ve got to have more wins on the board,” Francis said. “Our non-conference schedule this year is still tough, but there’s definitely games in there we can win.”
Going light on the early-season challenges certainly worked out well for Mangino, who built his team’s confidence with blowout victories against Florida International and Southeastern Louisiana. By the time Todd Reesing and friends reached the Big 12 schedule, they were on a roll, a 6-6 team transformed into a 12-1 juggernaut.
Kansas soccer could use a similar turnaround. The Jayhawks went 2-8-1 in the non-conference season, and couldn’t find their way to the NCAA Tournament despite a third-place finish in the Big 12.
In fairness, Francis didn’t keep his team’s schedule completely vanilla: Kansas defeated No. 20 Purdue, 3-0, last Friday. The Boilermakers are rebuilding after a 20-2-3 season, but any victory over a ranked team is a good one for the Jayhawks.
Speaking of cupcakes...
The big question heading into week one of football season isn’t whether Kansas will defeat Florida International (1-11 last season, including a 55-3 throttling at Kansas), but whether anyone will stick around until the game’s conclusion.
The buzz surrounding Jayhawk football is at fever pitch. The quarterback, Todd Reesing, is a bigger regional celeb than any of the basketball players — excluding Sherron Collins — and the Athletics Department is planting trees around practice fields in a desperate scramble to keep onlookers at a distance. This isn’t the Terry Allen era.
Despite the hubbub, Kansas football fans — mainly students — have become more famous for early exits and embarrassing goalpost shenanigans than for transforming Memorial Stadium into an ear-shattering, earth-moving, lion’s den of hostility.
Come Saturday, Reesing will turn in a few memorable plays, junior running back Jocques Crawford will most likely shine in his debut, and Joe Mortensen will lay the wood to a few unlucky Golden Panthers.
The football team will do its part. Will the fans follow suit?
Former Jayhawk misses homecoming
Former Kansas baseball player Travis Metcalf was three days away from a homecoming of sorts. Metcalf, an infielder in the Texas Rangers organization, was recalled from Triple-A on Aug. 1 and stayed with the big league club for three weeks. But Ranger infielder Hank Blaylock came off the disabled list on Friday, and the Rangers optioned Metcalf back to Triple-A. Too bad for Metcalf. The Rangers begin a three-game series with the Kansas City Royals tonight at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City, Mo., but Metcalf, a Manhattan native, will miss out on the festivities.
- Edited by Becka Cremer
Discussion
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"Despite the hubbub, Kansas football fans — mainly students — have become more famous for early exits and embarrassing goalpost shenanigans than for transforming Memorial Stadium into an ear-shattering, earth-moving, lion’s den of hostility."
Kansas football fans = Kansas State basketball fans.
Sad but true. I was at the KU-KSU game in 1994 in Lawrence where the Wildcat students tore down the KU goalposts (that was early in the Snyder era, win #2 in a streak of 11, '93-'03) and also at the KU-KSU game in 2004 in Lawrence when the Jayhawks students tore down the goalposts.
KU finished 4-7 that year, and there were notable come-from-ahead losses to Texas and Texas Tech that I remember from that season. Unfortunately for KU, those two teams are once again on the schedule. Also, there was a nice three-game stretch of similar blown leads in 2006 (Texas A&M, Okla. St., and Baylor).
If KU had held onto the leads in those five games, it would have been 6-5 in 2004 and 9-3 in 2006, and we'd be looking at FIVE straight bowl games for the Fightin' Manginos. Unfortunately, 2008 is an even-numbered year. ;-)
The only way to truly become a great program is to schedule the great teams in the non-conference schedule, and beat them. Example: most (but not all) of KU basketball's non-conference schedule.
Scheduling creampuffs will inevitably lead to "record inflation" (same as grade inflation) which becomes apparent when the team meets quality opponents later in the season (or earlier... see below). Mangino learned well under Snyder at K-State how to pad a schedule, but he should remember how the Wildcats always choked at the end of the season, losing the important games that really counted.
The three home non-conference games are not worth attending, plain and simple; and though it's not impossible, KU has little to no chance of going undefeated in conference this year. 5-3 at best in Big XII play, 9-3 overall (regular season). Though I think South Florida has a good chance for the "upset" in Tampa (meaning 8-4 for the Jayhawks... a more accurate reflection of the true "level" of the team).
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