**-So Saturday wasn’t a total loss for Kansas University.** In a theme which has been prevalent in this young basketball season, the Jayhawks played to the level of their competition on the hardwood, and Saturday it resulted in an [82-80 win over top-ranked, defending national champion Florida][1]. Everyone’s been talking about how fantastic Julian Wright and Darrell Arthur were in the game, and they certainly were. They weren’t perfect, though. Wright had a key foul in the final seconds of regulation which kept Florida alive, to point out one miscue. But not even that could put a damper on what was probably the best performance of his young KU career in front of a wealth of NBA scouts.But two performances not to be tossed out the window were those of Russell Robinson and Brandon Rush.Robinson had 12 points, seven rebounds, three assists and two blocks, and lost in the shuffle of everything that went on, maintained his role of KU’s most consistent all-around performer. That stat line should take no one by surprise. Plus, he had the game’s key defensive play late in overtime, stealing a Taurean Green pass right in front of his face in the waning seconds.Rush, on the other hand, took awhile to get going. The pre-season All-American had just one point at halftime, and was looking far too passive for his own good on the offensive end of the floor. At night’s end, he had 13 points, seven boards, four assists and three blocks. Plus, he showed he can turn it on when it counts, and that included a floater inside for the game-winning hoop in the final minute. Though he’ll need to play like he did in the second half and overtime much more frequently if he wants to live out his NBA dreams to the fullest. Well, actually, it’d probably fit pretty well in today’s NBA game.**-Rush’s on-and-off intensity brings up an interesting point.** At this juncture, two days after the win, if things feel a little crowded, it’s because the bandwagon has officially reloaded.The fans calling for Bill Self’s head after the Oral Roberts game are again silent. Heck, they shouldn’t have been talking in the first place.Though let us not lose sight of things, because the season’s first month isn’t even complete, and as the saying goes, it’s a marathon, not a sprint.Take this win for what it is – a nice November win. Because come mid-March, this win will mean nothing more than where the Jayhawks are seeded in the field of 64, just ask Bucknell and Bradley.It’s good to see the excitement back around this team, but what KU really learned from the Florida game will be evident Tuesday night when KU takes on Dartmouth, an unattractive non-conference opponent in it for the experience and the paycheck, at Allen Fieldhouse.Will the Jayhawks revert to their old ways of playing down to where they think the competition is? If they do, then the Florida win will have meant nothing. If they don’t, the win will be worth as much as it possibly could be, and in turn the Oral Roberts loss will be even more of a faded memory.**-Pardon a semi-basketball tangent, but hasn’t KU outgrown** the whole storming the court thing? If the Jayhawks were a mediocre bubble team beating the No. 1 team in the country, then fine. But this is one of the winningest program’s in college basketball history we’re talking about, one which has made 17 straight trips to the NCAA tournament. Though the fan support KU got on the road certainly had to help things Saturday. From the sound of things, the Jayhawks can expect a similar reception this weekend in Rosemont, Ill., to face the DePaul Blue Demons. DePaul’s home crowds are never that spectacular as it is, with their campus being a hefty drive from the Lincoln Park campus in Chicago out to the suburbs near O’Hare Airport. Add in the heavy KU alumni base in Chicago and its surrounding area, but it’s also a homecoming game for Julian Wright and Sherron Collins, both Chicago natives.**-Switching to the gridiron, because football talk will be absent until the spring game,** KU is still bowl eligible, and that will never change in the record books. But are the Jayhawks deserving of a bowl bid right now? Probably not, when you look at the [ list of 73 bowl eligible teams in Division I-A][2] after this weekend. There are [ 32 bowl games on tap][3] over the next couple of months, and [ KU’s 42-17 loss Saturday at Missouri][4] didn’t help for a couple of reasons.With bowl officials on hand, KU never found a rhythm after going away from what was working – Giving the ball to Jon Cornish. On top of that, the Jayhawks were blown out. Mark Mangino was sure to point out in the postgame press conference that it was KU’s first wide-margined loss of the season, and it sounded sort of like a plea to bowl officials to look at the rest of their schedule.The timing won’t help. If KU gets a bowl bid, the team would be back-dooring into the postseason, which would also probably hurt the number of fans who would travel for the game. That might be different had the Jayhawks, for argument’s sake, finished 6-6 by losing to K-State and then beating Missouri. Now, they’re tied for the eighth and final bowl spot in the Big 12 with Oklahoma State – one of what The Greene Room considers three should-have games from this season along with Baylor and Toledo.One bright spot for KU’s bowl case this weekend was [ South Florida beating West Virginia.][5] KU has just two quality wins as it is – USF and K-State. That makes [ the win over the Bulls][6] look that much better. Who knows, every little bit could help. **-Speaking of Jon Cornish,** you’ve got to feel for a guy who is such a great all-around football player and person when he gets shut out of the gameplan like he did Saturday. The run was working, as Cornish compiled 126 yards on the ground. Thing was that those 126 yards all came in the first three quarters, and he was not given a single tote in the game’s final 15 minutes.It’s understandable that when you’re trailing by as much as KU was in a game, the pass is the only way to light things up and score fast.Saturday might have been an exception.Aside from Cornish ripping Missouri apart on the famed option read, he could have helped KU do something it never was able to accomplish in Columbia – Setting the game’s tempo. The Jayhawks were sucked into a game of catch-up because of their inability to slow down Chase Daniel.(By the way, did you know that [ KU’s pass defense after last weekend ranks 119th out of 119 D-1A teams?][7] Also, the 470 pass attempts the Jayhawks faced in 2006 are by far the most defended by any defense in the country. The second highest total belonged to Michigan, who faced 443 and still has a BCS bowl game to go.)But back on topic with Cornish.He showed some media savvy after the game, just another sign that he has some sort of a future in the NFL. He could have called out the coaching staff for hamstringing him in the offensive gameplan – as was the case for much of the past two seasons – and he almost did, but refrained. Instead, he tackled it the right way, asking the media to compare how many carries he received Saturday to his season average. After looking into the numbers, it’s shown that his season average entering Saturday, as underused as he may have been, was 21.4 a contest. Props to Cornish, as well as the Jayhawks unheralded offensive line, for passing Tony Sands’ single-season rushing mark with 1,457 yards on the year. Sands’ total of 1,442 in 1991 was thanks in large part to a 58-carry, 396-yard day against Missouri to close his senior season. Not saying that Cornish should have pushed the 60-carry mark, but if Cornish had, say, doubled his carry total Saturday, what could that have done to the game? Food for thought. And with the bowl outlook appearing as it does, you can think about it until next fall.Oh yeah, plus the neutral zone infraction on fourth down in the third quarter with KU trailing 20-17 and on the cusp of gaining momentum back didn’t help, either. But that’s already been hammered to death.**-One other point of football interest** was the absence of Anthony Webb from the lineup for most of Saturday’s game. Webb, a true freshman from Dallas, was widely known as the cornerback on the opposite side of Aqib Talib who had been picked on most of the season, but was learning in the process. He graduated a week ago somewhat in football terms a week ago, with a huge game against Kansas State which included his first career pick-six.On Saturday, he played the first series, and for the most part was standing still on the sidelines the rest of the afternoon. Was he hurt? Did he mouth off to Mangino or something? No one outside of that team might ever know, and Mangino made sure of it after the game. When asked about it, he said Webb had gone through some struggles lately and pointed out a couple of nice plays by senior Dominic Roux in his place. Though he didn’t mention the fact that Daniel went after Roux all afternoon with his right arm and for the most part lit him up like a bonfire.Roux, a fifth-year senior, converted to corner about a month ago to help the team after working as a wideout his first four-and-a-half years. So why throw him into the fire full-time when Mangino did? Even if Webb had struggled on the first series, why not let him work through it as you had for the past several weeks? Unfortunately, again, no one will ever know.**-In the grand scheme of things,** the Jayhawks haven’t had a season in recent memory left with more ‘what-ifs.’ Via late-game meltdowns, the Jayhawks left four wins on the table and let them fall to the wayside. Two of which – again, Toledo and Baylor – were to teams the Jayhawks for all intensive purposes should have trumped.What makes the season disappointing as a whole is that the Jayhawks did not take advantage of the schedule they’ve waited a few years for. Combine the absence of Texas and Oklahoma from the schedule with a favorable non-conference schedule with three home games, including one against 1-AA competition, and a record of at least 8-4 should have been accomplished.A glimmer of hope that KU fans can hold on to is that maybe this team, with young pieces on both sides of the ball, will have learned from the experience and turn it into something positive next year. The schedule again tilts to the Jayhawks’ liking. This time, the non-conference schedule includes two MAC teams – Central Michigan and Toledo – and all four contests are at Memorial Stadium. Plus, KU gets one more year without the Big 12 South heavyweights on their schedule. They’ll have to play at Texas A&M and at Oklahoma State, both of whom should be strong, but 8-4 should be the benchmark for whether year six of the Mangino tenure is a success.**_KUSports.com editor Ryan Greene can be reached at rgreene@ljworld.com, or by phone at (785) 832-6357._** [1]: http://www2.kusports.com/news/2006/nov/26/later_gators/?mens_basketball [2]: http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=2636227 [3]: http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=2473969 [4]: http://www2.kusports.com/news/2006/nov/26/crushed/?football [5]: http://sports.yahoo.com/ncaaf/recap?gid=200611250017 [6]: http://www2.kusports.com/news/2006/sep/24/feelgood_story/ [7]: http://web1.ncaa.org/d1mfb/natlRank.jsp?year=2006&div=4&rpt=IA_teampassdef&site=org
