After two of the Kansas football team’s most gut-wrenching losses under head coach Lance Leipold occurred in successive weeks, the Jayhawks have their backs against the wall.
“We’re desperate,” middle linebacker Trey Lathan said. “We really want to win. We haven’t been able to these past couple weeks, but we definitely want to have a bowl season, so that’s what we’re trying to achieve.”
KU must win out to guarantee bowl eligibility as it enters one of the toughest portions of its schedule, beginning on Saturday at 4:30 p.m. Central time with a road game against West Virginia.
“Win, lose or draw, we have three more games on the schedule,” defensive end Leroy Harris III said. “What are we going to do now? Everybody wants to be a good player, we want to be a good team, so everyone needs to look in the mirror and see what we can do better.”
The Mountaineers took Texas Tech down to the wire on the road last week, only to lose 53-48 after a late safety in a game that resembled something from Big 12 offenses’ halcyon days in the early 2010s.
A lot of WVU’s games this season have had those sorts of scores — a 45-42 loss at Iowa State, a 45-42 win against Cincinnati — because in their second year under Rich Rodriguez, the Mountaineers have soared on offense and regressed dramatically on defense.
WVU proceeds down the field at the fifth-highest tempo in the nation, according to teamrankings.com. That’s nothing new compared to last season, when KU dominated the Mountaineers 41-10 in Lawrence. What is different is the caliber of player Rodriguez has at his disposal.
“It’s nothing you can really get from that besides a couple plays they ran,” KU defensive coordinator D.K. McDonald said this week. “But the Jimmies and Joes on the field are a lot different than the Dantes and Tariks they got running this year.”
Michael Hawkins Jr., a transfer from Oklahoma, has established himself as one of the nation’s preeminent dual-threat quarterbacks. He currently leads the nation with 19 rushing touchdowns (the two runners-up are option quarterbacks at Army and Navy) and has carried the ball 182 times for 924 yards.
He’s run the ball more often than thrown it in a handful of games this season, but Hawkins still has 1,901 passing yards with 12 touchdowns and just two interceptions.
”They don’t turn the ball over,” Leipold said. “They haven’t beaten themselves that way.”
Accompanying Hawkins in the backfield is former TCU running back Cam Cook, who underwent a career renaissance last season as the nation’s leading rusher at Jacksonville State and has provided a similar level of production to the Mountaineers, albeit averaging half a yard less per carry. His 209 rushes are tied with Missouri’s Jamal Roberts to lead the country and he has already passed 1,000 yards on the ground.
Clearly WVU has been a run-heavy team. The Mountaineers’ most prominent pass-catching threat is wide receiver DJ Epps, a Troy transfer with 23 catches for 564 yards and five touchdowns, but he hasn’t been the most consistent, as 389 of those yards have come in three games — in three of the last four games he has had one catch or fewer.
“It’s a lot different when you got better players,” McDonald said. “Their program administration (has) done a good job getting behind them, you can tell that. And then Rich Rod does what Rich Rod does, man.”
It’s hard to say exactly what the Mountaineers have been doing on the other side of the ball. WVU ranks at the bottom of the Big 12 in every major defensive category, including scoring defense, passing defense, rushing defense, defensive efficiency and opponent first downs. (And this unit has been out on the field a lot, as the high-tempo offense means the Mountaineers are last in the league in time of possession.)
The pass defense in particular is the worst in the nation, allowing 30 more yards per game than the next closest team, Texas State. Colorado State, which fired a coordinator midgame earlier this year, prevents WVU from being the worst in total defense.
Zac Alley came to WVU from Oklahoma as a promising young coach, and associate head coach Andy Kotelnicki said this week that the Mountaineers’ defense is “perhaps the most multiple I’ve ever seen in my career.” That hasn’t necessarily equated to strong execution, though.
“We’ve had, unfortunately, a tendency to make the other quarterback look really, really good,” Rodriguez told reporters this week.
WVU had one promising quarter against Texas Tech on this side of the ball in which it forced three three-and-outs and one four-play drive, buying time for its offense to briefly take the lead in the second half, and the Mountaineers will hope that’s a sign of things to come.
KU, meanwhile, will hope it can put together a full game on offense against what is certainly a vulnerable unit, instead of playing one good quarter or half as in some of its losses this season. As Leipold said this week, “We didn’t, like, draw up new plays at halftime” before quarterback Isaiah Marshall exploded for an extremely productive second half in last week’s 33-32 loss to UCF.
“We asked him and he was like, ‘I decided to go to play,'” Leipold said. “Well, OK, now we got to get him to relax and go play from the beginning and play with confidence.”
KANSAS JAYHAWKS (3-6, 1-5 BIG 12) VS. WEST VIRGINIA MOUNTAINEERS (5-4, 2-4 BIG 12)
• Milan Puskar Stadium, Morgantown, West Virginia, 4:30 p.m. Central time
• Broadcast: ESPNU
• Radio: Jayhawk Radio Network (in Lawrence, KLWN AM 1320 / K269GB FM 101.7 / KKSW FM 105.9)
• Betting line: WVU -3; over/under 67.5
• Series history: WVU leads 11-3
Keep an eye out
1. Unguarded: Both KU and WVU are dealing with key injuries on the interior offensive line. In the Jayhawks’ case, Connor Stroh, a Texas transfer who earned his way into the starting lineup with strong play early in the year, got hurt in the second half against UCF. That forced the Jayhawks to deviate from a group of five they had been using consistently for several weeks and bring back Amir Herring, whom Stroh had replaced. Herring looks set for his first start since the Kansas State game. On the West Virginia side, guard Amare “Bubba” Grayson, a leader on the line, is out for the rest of the regular season with an ankle injury. Josh Aisosa will have to step up and help the Mountaineers continue their run-game production.
2. Revolving door: Eight weeks after Arizona State returned a kick for a touchdown at a crucial moment against KU in the Union Jack Classic, the Jayhawks’ kickoffs continue to be a significant issue. Neither the coverage nor the actual kicks themselves have been remotely consistent; KU gave freshman walk-on punter Ben Shipley a chance against UCF and he promptly drilled one out of bounds, while usual kickoff specialist Dane Efird has in the last four games recorded just two touchbacks and one kick out of bounds himself. As Leipold said this week, it starts with the kickers. But if they can’t get it through the end zone, the coverage unit needs to do better than allowing 28.2 yards per return, which if it were a team’s average would rank No. 7 in the country. (WVU for the record, has only returned five kicks all year and averages 19.2 yards.)
3. Power football: KU has struggled to get consistent production out of its running backs in recent weeks, even as Marshall has emerged as a more prominent threat himself on the ground. Dylan Edwards, over his last five games as the Jayhawks’ feature back, is averaging just 3.4 yards per carry on 88 rushes. Khijohnn Cummings-Coleman’s performance against UCF, with 11 carries for 48 yards and a touchdown, provided some reason to believe KU might have a legitimate change-of-pace option going forward, but he’ll have to sustain that to a greater degree than fellow running back Chase Belcher. The incorporation of these two, plus offensive lineman DeAndre Harper as a fullback — Kotelnicki has threatened to have him catch a pass now that he’s wearing an eligible number — could help make things easier on Edwards going forward.
SPOTLIGHT ON…
Trey Lathan: KU’s starting middle linebacker and captain has somewhat quietly had a very strong season, with a team-high 62 tackles (and team-high two interceptions). Now he’ll travel back to the school where he spent his first three years of college football. Last year, Lathan had a sack and a pick against WVU. This time, he’ll be as important as any single player in containing the Mountaineers’ rushing offense. Lathan reminisced this week about where he used to live across from Milan Puskar Stadium; he’s certainly remained connected to the WVU community through his regular donations to the local children’s hospital. He has a chance to make his final game in town one to remember.
INSIDE THE NUMBERS
44: Harris’ total number of pressures this season, according to Pro Football Focus; it leads power-conference players and is tied for second nationally (the players tied or ahead of him have all played one more game than he has).
41.68%: The proportion of time in second quarters during which KU has had the ball this season, according to teamrankings.com, which is fifth-lowest in the country.
10.9: Hawkins’ number of yards per pass attempt, which leads all quarterbacks.
PREDICTION
WVU wins 42-34. McDonald compared Hawkins and Cook to Utah’s Devon Dampier and Wayshawn Parker. That doesn’t bode well for the Jayhawks’ defense considering the 545 yards of offense they gave up to the Utes on the road earlier this year. Rodriguez’s offense isn’t as wacky as Utah’s Kevin McGiven’s, but will still challenge KU in ways that Baylor’s, TCU’s and UCF’s didn’t. And it’s hard to imagine the Jayhawks’ offense this season mustering the consistency required, even against a defense as poor as WVU’s, to win in a shootout.
— Sports reporter David Rodish contributed to this story.
