Nick KrugJust when the Kansas University football team thought it was done with these high-octane Big 12 offenses, just when players figured they could relax a little bit, play in the box, enjoy a little old-fashioned style of football — the kind they played before Mike Leach started hanging around the conference’s sidelines and 4,000-yard passing seasons became the norm — they find themselves matched up with Minnesota in the Insight Bowl.
The Gophers, of course, are one of the few teams in the Big Ten — a conference notorious for its not-so-cutting-edge offensive systems — to work regularly out of the spread formation.
And the prospect of facing yet another predominantly aerial attack today at 5 p.m. in Tempe, Ariz., has some Kansas players shaking their heads.
“I’m kind of disappointed that they’re a spread offense,” said senior linebacker James Holt, who leads the Jayhawks with 97 tackles and six forced fumbles. “But … it’s stuff that we’ve seen all year, so it’s nothing too surprising.”
While it likely will be a watered-down version compared to what Kansas is used to seeing — Minnesota isn’t quite in the same league as the Oklahomas, Texases and Texas Techs of the world — the Gophers have proven they can toss the ball around a little, too.
Sophomore quarterback Adam Weber earned second-team all-conference honors this season after throwing for 2,585 yards and 14 touchdowns with a completion percentage of 63 percent.
Like a lot of successful spread quarterbacks, he also has exhibited the ability to run the ball when necessary, enough so to draw comparisons to South Florida dual-threat quarterback Matt Grothe, whose versatile play helped spark the Bulls to a 37-34 victory over Kansas earlier this season.
“They do a good job,” Kansas coach Mark Mangino said. “They’re in spread formations, but the quarterback will pull the ball down and run with it, (and) he knows where to get it.”
What’s more, the Gophers’ run game has been nearly non-existent throughout the final stages of the regular season. And while Minnesota second-year coach Tim Brewster voiced his intentions to implement a power running scheme into the team’s game plan, based on his feeling that the Gophers will have to be able to run the ball if they hope to earn their first bowl victory in four years, he also made it known that Minnesota is — and will continue to be — a spread team.
On the eve of today’s game, however, members of the Jayhawks — Holt notwithstanding — didn’t appear too distraught over the prospect of lining up against yet another spread attack.
As Mangino noted a few days before his team boarded a plane for Tempe on a quest to earn back-to-back bowl titles for the first time in the program’s history, “It’s nothing that we haven’t seen already.”
