Locked On Jayhawks - Daily Podcast On Kansas Jayhawks Football & Basketball - REACTION: Questions Emerge as Kansas Jayhawks Football Falls at Illinois Fighting Illini 23-17

Starting point is 00:00:00 On today's Locked on Jayhawks, I'm Miss Andy Kotelnicki. You are Locked on Jayhawks, your daily podcast on the Kansas Jayhawks. Part of the Locked on Podcast Network, your team every day. I'm Derek Johnson. You can find me on Twitter at D Johnson radio, and this is locked on Jay Hawks. Thank you to the everydayers tuning in to each and every episode. Thank you for making locked on Jay Hawks. Your first listen every day. We are free and available anywhere you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 00:00:35 You can also find us on our YouTube page where you can like and subscribe. We're going to get into KU losing to Illinois 23 to 17. What went wrong in the game? What does it mean for KU moving forward in the near and short term? We get to go to the game. What happened for good players and bad players in the game? What's next for KU with all of a sudden a huge game against UNLV? Today's episode of the show is brought to you by 5-Hour Energy.

Starting point is 00:01:02 Go to 5hourenergy.com. Use promo code LOCKEDONCFB to receive 20% off your order. So let's start here. Kansas loses 23-17, just a maddening loss from several different avenues. One, KU had the lead late, couldn't hold on to it. Two, you look at, you feel like, I don't know, I feel like Kansas is still the better team,

Starting point is 00:01:24 that it was just Illinois' night. And I don't know, maybe in the long haul, it'll be proven that Illinois is the better team, and that's why they won this game, right? But there were just bad turnovers, some weird stuff that happened. You're on the road in this game early in the season. The goals are still in front of KU. That's kind of the good news here. This isn't a big 12 loss. It was always going to be determined whether KU made the playoff or not by if they win the big 12, like this isn't going to matter to that.

Starting point is 00:01:52 Now there are other goals you can get to making it to a bowl game, winning 10 games. That would be a huge deal for this program that those take a hit by losing this game. But if you're talking about the largest goal, which is trying to win the big 12 and make the playoff, those are still in front of you. The problem becomes, though, if you're losing this game, if you're losing at Illinois, a team who, I don't know, could win five, six games, maybe Illinois is better than this. Maybe Illinois with Brett Bielema ends up

Starting point is 00:02:17 being a seven or eight win team, and you feel a little bit different at this at the end of the day. And that kind of remains to be seen in how that plays out. But if you're losing this game, you have a lot of other games on your schedule who are playing teams either right below of the same caliber or even better than Illinois this season. So if you're losing in Illinois, how are you expecting to lose to win at West Virginia? Or how are you expecting to beat Iowa State or some of these other teams? Iowa State just got a big win at Iowa, by the way. So you look at some of these, and obviously not every game is the same and every matchup is the same and matchups, you know, styles make fighting, so to speak, and everything like that. But point being, if this is the Kansas,

Starting point is 00:02:58 the one we saw in this game that we're going to see for a majority of the game moves moving forward, the Big 12 title conversation is not a conversation. It should more so be moving the goalpost to, can you make a third consecutive bowl game? Can you beat your rival in Kansas State? Like those would become the discussions as opposed to the Big 12. Now it is still early in the season, so we don't have to move to those goals at least just yet,

Starting point is 00:03:19 but it does start moving to our forefront a little bit because Jalen Daniels really struggled in this football game. It was rough. It felt like the play calling wasn't great either. Kansas was able to run the football. They just didn't want to do it as much. And Kansas just decided to like passing the ball. It felt like it was either a receiver screen or a deep ball. And that wasn't very effective for KU because they averaged less yards per pass than they average yards per run. You don't see that very often. That was not good. And so I don't know how much of the blame you divvy out to maybe just Jalen, you know, continuing to build the rust off. I mean, let's not forget,

Starting point is 00:03:54 he didn't really play in spring ball, didn't play last year, right? There's rust that you're building off. I don't know if there's a residual impact of the injuries that he has. I don't know if it's Andy Kolnicki, the offensive coordinator who's now at Penn State. How much of maybe is there just a big downgrade from him to Jeff Grimes? Is it just that it's early in the season and Jeff Grimes is still working through the new system for Kansas and that's just going to get better as the season goes on? Those are things that we don't

Starting point is 00:04:19 have the answer to because it's just week two, but you saw some bad warning signs in this game that if it's not corrected quickly, this thing could go south in quite the hurry. Now on the bright side, to give a little positive here, the defense played a great game. Now you could argue, okay, they scored 23. They had the drop ball that would have been a touchdown, ended up being a field goal. They could have scored 27. Like how great of a defensive performance really is that okay but you also threw a pick six on your end of the ball which was just i mean combination of a bad play call you're calling the same play to the opposite side everybody knew it was coming um bad throw whatever you want to call it so that gives up seven points you gave up the other field the first field goal after you threw an interception which gives a

Starting point is 00:05:05 bit of a momentum boost in its own um i think they scored the uh what they had the other score off the the muff punt that should i don't know that's the the dumbest rule ever um but they scored again off that like a lot of their scores were off momentum boosting or changing plays and overall like your defense you held them to 271 yards of offense. They averaged 2.3 yards per carry. If you would have told me Kansas was going to hold Illinois to 271 and 2.3 yards per carry coming into this one, I would have said Kansas is going to win this game by two, three touchdowns at minimum.

Starting point is 00:05:39 Like seriously, that's what I would have thought coming into this game, which makes it both more maddening and a little bit of optimism coming out of this game because the optimistic part is that hey you stop the team who's got a big running back who wants to run the football and lean on you and that can come into play in games against like West Virginia and Iowa State and I don't know some of these I don't know Iowa State throws it maybe a little bit more but nonetheless like that can come into handy in some of these games and that looked like a really good run defense, an improved run defense, an improved defense overall. That's a good sign for the big picture.

Starting point is 00:06:10 But if Jalen Daniels ain't the guy that we think Jalen Daniels can be and has been in the past, and if Jeff Grimes ain't close to Andy Kowalicki, how much does it matter? Because if you're taking a step forward on defense, what if you took two steps back on the offensive side of the football? And so it's just maddening because KU only had 327 on offense on their own. And a lot of that came on that last drive, just picking up some garbage time yards. They averaged five yards per play. This is crazy though. KU averaged 5.6 yards per carry. They only averaged 4.4 yards per

Starting point is 00:06:43 pass and they had three turnovers. I mean, holy cow. That is like run the ball, run the ball. You know, I don't know. I don't know what else to say. Run the ball. Like Kansas was able to run the football. Well, Devin Neal had a good game. Daniel Hysha had a good game.

Starting point is 00:06:59 They're just throwing deep every play and it's incomplete or it's an interception at some point. Why do you not do something? I just didn't understand it. I didn't understand it. And I don't know what to think of that moving forward because on one hand, I guess play calling is easy to correct, like just change what you're doing.

Starting point is 00:07:17 But also, like, I don't know, if you're calling plays, like that typically is just what – I don't know. I don't know. A lot of questions there, I guess is uh point being I think you can make an argument that's up there with the short list of worst losses in the Lance Leipold era I mean it's hard to pick anything from 2021 you could argue like the Iowa State or the Texas Tech homecoming games in 2021 just from a standpoint of like how bad you got beat you were never never, never really competitive. You could argue maybe a few games here, there in 2022. I don't know, but it's kind of hard. Like you made a bowl game that year,

Starting point is 00:07:51 2023, maybe last year, you could argue like Texas tech. You had a lot of chances to win that game. You could argue the Kansas state game from the standpoint of like what that win would have meant and that you had a lot of chances to win it. But even then both those games, you had like a third string quarterback in there. You could argue, this is it. Like you could argue both those games, you had like a third string quarterback in there. You could argue this is it. Like you could argue this is the one in terms of that kind of being the case. But it kind of depends how KU responds from here, which becomes the big question.

Starting point is 00:08:13 Because big picture, I could make the argument either way. And we will, based on where Kansas goes, that this was either a warning sign or this was a blip on the radar. The side of it where big picture I can make you feel okay after this is me saying, hey, teams lose on the road in college football all the time. And if Illinois ends up being a six or seven win football team, that happens all the time in college football. And in theory, how is this that much different in product like the win and loss is different but in process if I compared Kansas's road game at Nevada in Reno a 2 and 10 Nevada team last year to their game that they played tonight against Illinois and lost against a better Illinois team in a tougher home environment like the process outside of the result, the process probably worse to only beat that Nevada team by seven than it is

Starting point is 00:09:10 to lose on the road to Illinois, where some weird things happen like that weird muff punt that again, I don't know why that's not a safety or whatever. That's a dumb rule where stuff like that, where you had bad turnovers, where you didn't look good and still figuring stuff out early in the season. This on its own is almost a better result process driven than that Nevada one and Kansas ended up being just fine last year and I can also point to like last year in the Big 12 championship game who

Starting point is 00:09:35 played for the Big 12 championship Texas and Oklahoma State Texas was tied 10 to 10 in the fourth quarter against Wyoming now they won the game good for them Oklahoma State lost and it was either week two or week three to South Alabama they didn't just lose they got crushed South Alabama who ended up being like a 6 and 16 they lost by 30 points to South Alabama they still made the the Big 12 championship now they made a tangible change Ollie Gordon became like the lead back and turned into a Heisman candidate right I don't know that Kansas is a Heisman candidate sitting on the bench I don't know Cole Bauer come. No, no, it'll continue to be Jalen. But I guess point being, also you go back to two years ago, this is also a little different because that Tulane team ended up winning a New Year's Six Bowl, but like K-State lost to Tulane,

Starting point is 00:10:18 they ended up winning the Big 12 championship. So who knows? Maybe Illinois ends up being really good. I could point to this and say, okay, you saw signs that the defense is better. And on the offensive side of the football, as long as Jalen Angles gets back to the Jalen that we've seen on the bigger sample size, the running game was still there. Like everything else should be clicking. You just stop the turnovers and Jalen's normal Jalen, and you start running the ball more. You're going to be good to go, right? You can make those arguments with the big picture stuff, and this doesn't count for conference loss. But if we're talking about the other side of the

Starting point is 00:10:48 argument, I could also make the argument you should feel horrible about ever getting your hopes up as high as you might have done in the offseason about that Kansas could win the Big 12 or could make the college football playoff. Because if you're losing at Illinois, how do you expect to beat Iowa State? How do you expect to win at Kansas State and win some of these big games that you need to win if you want to accomplish that? And that the goal should be, you know, just go for a third straight bowl game or whatever it is. And that there are real leaks in what the passing game is going to look like. And that the transition to Jeff Grimes is not going to be as smooth sailing as we might've thought. All of that depends whether you're on the positive side or the negative side. It's a fork in the road upcoming this week with really the UNLV game. I might even argue the game

Starting point is 00:11:29 after that too with West Virginia, because if you beat UNLV, but lose to West Virginia and you're two and two, I don't know, you're kind of back to square one. But these next two weeks kind of will be the fork in the road on whether this was just a weird, bad game, or if it was a precursor of what this season is going to be like from KU. It's a learning opportunity, and we'll see where they go from here. Let's get to our goats of the game on Locked on Jayhawks. We were brought to you by 5-Hour Energy. I need one right now, and I'm going to tomorrow for NFL Sunday because we're up late talking here on the show,

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Starting point is 00:13:00 The code is not good on subscriptions. Go to 5hourenergy.com today. Continuing on with Locked On Jayhawks, our goats of the game, our good goats, our bad goats. I normally do a KU play of the game. It's harder to do in a loss. If I was going to give it out, had they ended up winning, there was like that third and long where they threw the out route to Skinner.

Starting point is 00:13:21 He ends up getting the first down. They end up going down later and getting the touchdown, I think, to L.J. Arnold. That might have been the play of the game to that point. If you're talking about the negative play of the game, I don't know. There were a couple big throws. Luke Altmyer out-dueled Jalen Daniels in this game. He made a couple big-time throws on some third and longs.

Starting point is 00:13:39 I would probably point – there's so many things that went wrong for KU. Probably the interception. I would think when KU was on like the plus 40 in the second half that might be like the negative play of the game that that caused it to go awry so as far as the good goats here if you have Luke Graham in a college football fantasy league that dude is just going to eat up targets Jalen Daniels is it's almost like too much he's kind of just staring him down he had nine catches in the game low yardage shuttle but anyway Devin Neal gets a good goat here. He was awesome. 14 carries, 101 yards. He averaged over seven yards per carry. Unfortunately, they didn't give him the

Starting point is 00:14:14 football enough. You have one of the best running backs in college football. Feed the beast. I didn't understand that. So if you add in Daniel Hyshaw, the two of them had 21 carries for 140 yards. I think every game Neal should be getting 15 plus carries and Hyshaw, the two of them had 21 carries for 140 yards. I think every game, Neal should be getting 15 plus carries and Hyshaw should be getting 10 plus carries. And that's kind of at minimum. I don't know, man. Offensive line, I think had a good game for KU. There were a few plays with pressure. I think Jalen got sacked once, but it was only one sack and you were able to run the football. The passing game struggles for KU wasn't about the offensive line getting beat up by the Illinois D-line.

Starting point is 00:14:48 It was a play-calling thing. It was taking way too many shots downfield when it wasn't there. And just, you know, maybe some poor decisions here or there or poor play-calls, whatever it was. I thought the offensive line played good for Kansas. Marvin Grant had an awesome game. Nine tackles. He had a sack.

Starting point is 00:15:04 He had a pass breakup. I thought he should have got credited with that forced fumble, but it ended up being credited to Cornell Wheeler. I also gave a good goat to Cornell Wheeler. He had eight tackles. Three TFLs got the forced fumble. Those guys were awesome as kind of, I mean, Grant kind of playing that linebacker hybrid hawk Cinco role. Cornell Wheeler plugging up the middle. Both those guys played really good games for KU. The KUD line, I think, gets a good go just in general in the same vein as the offensive line because I think it was a little bit of everyone.

Starting point is 00:15:33 I don't think there was one guy who was like, yeah, he just had a dominant game, but everybody had their flash moments on the D line. You held them to just a little over two yards per carry. You would have taken that coming into the game. You got a couple sacks on Luke Altmyer and a couple other plays where you didn't get sacks but you forced pressures that you forced incompletions on plays that would have been like I'm thinking of a couple like bootleg plays where you got on him so quickly and deep in the backfield he couldn't complete

Starting point is 00:15:57 what would have been normally just kind of an easy throw to the flats like the pressure was there the run stuffing was there there were some flash plays by Jeremy Robinson there were some flash plays by Dylan Woodkey DJ Warner early in the game there was that sack by Dean Miller Tommy Dunn had some flash in there like there were a few DJ Withers play a lot of guys flashed on that D line I thought they had a good game and then Damon Greaves the big question for him coming into year two was, could he add more distance on his punts? Well, two punts, over 50 yards on both, long of 58. Good on Damon Greaves for doing that, even though it was just two punts. What about the bad goats in this game? I mean, I feel bad singling guys out, but that was a bad game for Jalen Daniels.

Starting point is 00:16:38 18 of 32, 141 yards, two touchdowns, three interceptions, 10 carries for 35 yards. If you either take care of the football or hit the D like you got to do one of the two, if you're, if you're going to take all these deep shots and be high risk, high reward, it's got to be one of the two. You either got to hit on some like, right. Like the James Winston thing where it's like, I'm throwing picks, but I'm hitting some big plays, or you got to keep hold of the football and play that possession game and take care of the ball so that your running game and your defense can take over and I think the way I would put it the 2022

Starting point is 00:17:11 plus 2023 versions of Jalen Daniels was the best QB of the Leipold era Jason Bean last season would be next up and Jalen Daniels what we seeing now, would probably be below what Jason Bean was in both 2022 and 2023. It is still early. Maybe he's just shaking off rust. Again, it had been a long time since he played football, didn't really play in spring ball, and obviously missing all of last season. Maybe some of this stuff is still bothering him. Maybe he's still adjusting to the offense.

Starting point is 00:17:39 Maybe more of this is on the play calling and the OC than it is on Jalen. I mean, keep in mind they have the stuff in the headset, right? Like, I mean, there's a chance that one of the coaches is signaling to him where they're saying, hey, they're in this coverage. This guy's going to be open on this play. And then Jalen throws that guy and he gets picked, right? Like, I don't know. There could be blame to throw around at different people.

Starting point is 00:18:01 And I don't know where that goes, but that was not a good passing game. Again, they averaged over one yard less per pass than they did per run. In the past couple of years, KU has been averaging nine, nine and a half yards per pass, which is good of a running team as they've been. It's basically like four yards more than they're averaging per carry. And that was not at all the case tonight. I think it's also apparent that Andy Kotelnicki was a gigantic upgrade over Jeff Grimes. Jeff Grimes was fired from Baylor, and there was some of it where it was just like, okay, he was just set up based on the personnel and what was going on at Baylor with Dave Aranda and everything.

Starting point is 00:18:35 But, like, I don't know. I'm starting to wonder. Maybe there's a little bit more blame that needed to be talked about there. Run the football. Run the ball. Kansas was running the football really well. How many times did it feel like they had a good run on first down? Or honestly, they didn't even run that much on first down.

Starting point is 00:18:53 Or it'd be second and 10 and they'd have like a seven yard run. It's third and three and it's like deep shot. It's like, what's going on here? Don't love the play calling. Now, was that just an early season thing where Illinois tricked them in a way? And maybe Illinois had a lot of exotic defenses and they thought they were going to get one thing on film and so they game planned for this and it ended up being something completely different because it's early in the season and you don't have as much stuff on tape of what a team is going to do that is entirely possible uh is it also possible you're adjusting early on in in your career and um or your time at

Starting point is 00:19:23 Kansas and and they'll figure this out and see what happened on tape and get better for it. Yeah. That's entirely possible too. As far as this game on Saturday, very poor from those two guys. And honestly, the running game was good enough to win. The defense was good enough to win. The special teams was good enough to win. Unfortunately, like those are two kinds of big things, your play calling and your quarterback. Also the rule on the muff punts, again, that's a bad goat. What are we doing here? That's the dumbest rule ever.

Starting point is 00:19:53 One other quick one I do want to bring up is time management because specifically timeout management. Coaches do this all the time. It blows my mind, and I don't understand it. Somebody needs to explain to people like, I mean, these coaches are very smart people. They're very high paid people, but like this seems to be such an oversight. You are losing time by not calling timeouts before the two minute warning. Okay. Here's what I mean by that. Let's say it is first and 10 for a team and the other team has two timeouts. Okay. And there's two minutes and 30

Starting point is 00:20:26 seconds or two minutes and 40 seconds, right? There's the two minute warning or two minute timeout, whatever you want to call it. And okay. They run a play. You call a timeout. Now there's two 30. They run another play. You call another timeout. Now there's two 20. They run their third down play and then it's fourth down. Now what does the clock stop at? Stops at the two-minute warning. So there'd be two minutes on the clock, right? Okay, let's flip this the other way. There's 240 on the clock. They run their first down play.

Starting point is 00:20:53 You don't call your timeout. Clock stops at two minutes to go. So there's a two-minute warning. You still got your two timeouts. Now, second down, they run a play. Say it takes to 154, take a timeout. They run another play. Let's say it takes to 149.

Starting point is 00:21:12 You take your timeout. It's still fourth down in both scenarios. The other scenario, there's a minute 49 left. The first scenario, you're taking the timeout before the two-minute warning. There's two minutes left. Not a ton of time difference, but that's 10 or 11 seconds. What do you think? I mean, I don't know that it would have mattered at the end of the game, but don't you think Kansas would have liked another 10 or 11 seconds at the end of the game to maybe get one more like 10 yard gain. So they could have actually gotten the Hail Mary off. I don't know. Maybe that's just me. All right, let's finish up. What's next for KU big game upcoming with UNLV. This episode of the show is brought to you by Ibotta. It's summertime, which means it's barbecue season. Stock up on all your grilling favorites and earn cash back on every purchase when you use Ibotta.

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Starting point is 00:22:29 Use code LOCKEDONCOLLEGE. That's Ibotta, I-B-O-T-T-A in the Google Play or App Store today. Use code LOCKEDONCOLLEGE. All right. Thanks for joining us here on Locked on Jayhawks. Thanks for making us your first listen every day. We are free and available anywhere you get your podcast. So next up for KU, they get UNLV.

Starting point is 00:22:51 And UNLV looks like they're better than last year. They beat Utah Tech 72-14, which I don't know. Utah Tech might be horrible. But Utah Tech did play Montana State kind of close. And Montana State was one of the powerhouses in the FCS. So I don't know. That might be something. it might be not. But I think what's more interesting is what UNLV did in week one.

Starting point is 00:23:09 They beat Houston 27 to 7. And that was a game where we kind of looked at it and went, okay, that is alarming. UNLV could be pretty good, but Houston might just stink. What if Houston is just like a two-win team or something like that? Well, what did Houston do this week? They almost beat 15th ranked Oklahoma. 16 to 12 was the final score.

Starting point is 00:23:30 Now maybe that'll just be the aberration. And that was Houston's best game of the season. And Oklahoma overlooked them. And Houston will still end up winning two games or something like that. Maybe Oklahoma will be a seven-win team. I don't know. So many puzzle pieces to figure out this early in the season. But I'll tell you this.

Starting point is 00:23:44 I think UNLV is a better team than last year because I think UNLV's defense is much better than it was a season ago. I don't think the QB play is quite as good without Jaden Maiva, but it's still good enough, and their skill players are back. They're really good players. This might be a coin flip type game. Like, I don't know. Is it going to be crazy if UNLV – I don't think UNLV will be a favorite,

Starting point is 00:24:02 but it might be like KU by minus two and a half, minus three, which is pretty nuts coming into this one. So this is a fork-in-the-road type game for KU. Are you the team you showed against Illinois, or are you going to figure out the passing? Because you look at that UNLV game last year, how did KU win it? Jason Bean had six touchdowns. They didn't have that great of a running game. Jason Bean had six passing touchdowns, threw it all over the field, was the bowl game MVP,

Starting point is 00:24:23 and all the receivers went off. The offense we just saw against Illinois, you have trust that they can do that again against UNLV. But if they do, all of a sudden you're going to be like, okay, they figured it out. They found their mojo. That Illinois game was a blip in the radar. You lose to UNLV, all of a sudden we start talking much different goals. We start talking, can you crawl your way to six wins to make a third straight bowl game?

Starting point is 00:24:46 Because that would still be, you know, big picture, a good step, I guess you would say, in where this program is going. But from where the preseason was, if you want to get back to the point where you're talking about being a top 25 team, being a Big 12 title contender, being a team that can, you know, contend to win double-digit games, you got to show out this next week and show that the Illinois game that we just saw was more of the aberration.

Starting point is 00:25:08 That'll do it for this episode of Locked on Jayhawks. You can find our show anywhere you get your podcast, including on our YouTube page. We'll have our key takeaways coming up later this week, more on the KU-UNLV game, and plenty to come at you. This has been Locked on Jayhawks.

Locked On Jayhawks - Daily Podcast On Kansas Jayhawks Football & Basketball - REACTION: Questions Emerge as Kansas Jayhawks Football Falls at Illinois Fighting Illini 23-17

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