SALT LAKE CITY — In Saturday’s 41-24 loss to No. 12 Utah, the Kansas football team relied as heavily as in any game this year on the trio of wide receivers Cam Pickett, Nik McMillan and Nahzae Cox.
The group accounted for 26 of quarterback Isaiah Marshall’s 37 targets, and Pickett had a career-best day with eight catches for 134 yards. McMillan caught four passes for 89 yards and one touchdown, and could have had another if not for his late end-zone drop. No other wide receiver outside of this top three made a catch on the day.
“You can see we’re a different offense when Cam Pickett’s on the field. Nahzae made nice plays, Nik made some catches,” head coach Lance Leipold said in his postgame radio interview. “Unfortunately the last one (for McMillan) was unfortunate, but those guys all in all played a solid game.”
While it amounted to a 333-yard showing for Marshall, the focus on this group was not exactly by design, to hear Leipold tell it.
“We lost Keaton (Kubecka) today,” he said. “We lost Keaton early in the game and then Tate (Nagy) really wasn’t available yet, so hasn’t done much, so we really only had those three and we leaned on them heavily.”
That was a tough pair of absences for KU to endure, especially given that it only recently got Pickett back to full strength after he missed nearly all of the first three games. Kubecka had been KU’s highest-snapped wide receiver prior to Saturday night, according to Pro Football Focus, but he only played seven offensive snaps against Utah and was targeted once.
Nagy, meanwhile, had missed KU’s win over Middle Tennessee on Oct. 3 due to an unspecified injury. But on Wednesday he was listed as probable on KU’s availability report and then he had no designation the rest of the week. He appeared on offense for one play and also fair-caught a punt.
Nagy has six catches for 101 yards and two scores on the year, plus a punt-return touchdown. Kubecka has caught six passes for 67 yards.
Marshall was able to get along without them on Saturday, at least after he heated up late in the second quarter.
“He’s continued to get confidence and understanding,” Leipold said. “And all in all he had great composure, he got rid of the ball when he needed to and extended a play long enough to get rid of it, things like that. Those are the steps that we need him to make and it’s good to see him do it.”
The Jayhawks will attempt to replicate and even improve their passing-game production when they hit the road for Manhattan, where they will face Kansas State at 11 a.m. on Saturday.
“Competing’s not the question,” Leipold said in the radio interview. “We got to get out of the competing business and back to winning business.”
