Today, the Kansas football program begins preparation for another dismal season with the start of spring practices. For 14 days this month and trickling into next month, about 80 football players will look to improve about 1 million percent to compete in the Big 12 next fall.
But before practices even begin, the Jayhawks can take comfort in knowing they no longer have fierce competition within city limits.
Yeah, that’s right. The city limits.
The 2002 Kansas football team fell short too many times.
The Jayhawks went 2-10, producing their worst record in 14 years. They won zero Big 12 games. They’ll go down this school year as the most terrible sports team at the University of Kansas — by far.
But covering the play of both Kansas and Lawrence’s two high school football teams last fall — Lawrence High and Free State High — led me to observe the most glaring, humiliating and hilarious truth pertaining to football in Lawrence.
The Lawrence High School running back tandem was better than the University of Kansas’.
It’s true. I couldn’t make this up.
Kansas had Clark Green (average), Dan Coke (below average) and Reggie Duncan for a few plays last fall.
Lawrence High School, meanwhile, had super speedster Chris Fulton and big, bruising Brandon McAnderson behind its quarterback — who, coincidentally, was Tommy Mangino, Kansas coach Mark Mangino’s son.
McAnderson rushed for 1,789 yards and 25 touchdowns for Lawrence High last fall. Fulton racked up 1,340 yards and 17 touchdowns.
Really, the only thing stopping either of them from even more ridiculous statistics was one another. Without Fulton, McAnderson would have carried the ball more and probably gotten 2,000 yards. Without McAnderson, Fulton could have flirted with two thousand.
Their styles of play were strikingly contrasting, yet equally effective. And both were superior to any running back on Kansas’ roster.
It’s pretty embarrassing when an NCAA Division I-A university is outdone by the local high school.
Fortunately for Kansas fans, Mark Mangino knows that if you can’t beat them, you’d better join them.
Mangino watched his son hand off to the LHS backfield every Friday night in the fall. He liked what he saw. So he grabbed McAnderson, a 6-foot, 220-pound horse, and gave him one of the 3 million scholarships the football program is allowed to give out.
Mangino may have implied that he saw more running back talent on Friday nights than Saturdays when he announced that McAnderson had signed his letter-of-intent.
“I thought Brandon McAnderson was a no-brainer for us,” Mangino said.
Fulton, meanwhile, is headed to Butler County Community College and could very well end up in the Division I-A ranks in a couple of years.
Sure, today marks the first of Kansas football’s 14 spring practices. But they’ve already made remarkable strides. Thanks to the graduation of McAnderson and Fulton from Lawrence High, Kansas can finally lay claim to the best running back corps in the city of Lawrence.
Congratulations, Jayhawks.
