Locked On Jayhawks - Daily Podcast On Kansas Jayhawks Football & Basketball - Takeaways from Kansas Jayhawks Football's 39-32 Loss to Oklahoma State: What to Make of the Defense?

Episode Date: October 16, 2023

Top short and long-term takeaways from Kansas Jayhawks Football's 39-32 loss to Oklahoma State Cowboys in Stillwater, OK. What to make of Jason Bean, the defense, the lack of rushing game and more. Plus, continued strong play from the safety group of Kenny Logan Jr., OJ Burroughs and Marvin Grant. More on what's next with the Oklahoma Sooners.Support Us By Supporting Our Sponsors!BetterhelpThis podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp.If you’re thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. Visit BetterHelp.com/lockedoncollege today to get 10% off your first month. BirddogsGo to birddogs.com/lockedoncollege or enter promo code LOCKEDONCOLLEGE for a free water bottle with any purchase. You won't want to take your birddogs off we promise you.eBay MotorsWith all the parts you need at the prices you want, it’s easy to turn your car into the MVP and bring home that win. Keep your ride-or-die alive at EbayMotors.com. Eligible items only. Exclusions apply. eBay Guaranteed Fit only available to US customers.Athletic BrewingGo to AthleticBrewing.com and enter code LOCKEDON to get 15% off your first online order or find a store near you! Athletic Brewing. Milford, CT and San Diego, CA. Near Beer.PrizePicksGo to PrizePicks.com/lockedoncollege and use code lockedoncollege for a first deposit match up to $100! Daily Fantasy Sports Made Easy!GametimeDownload the Gametime app, create an account, and use code LOCKEDONCOLLEGE for $20 off your first purchase.Jase MedicalGet $20 off these lifesaving antibiotics with Jase Medical by using code LOCKEDON at checkout on jasemedical.com.LinkedInLinkedIn Jobs helps you find the qualified candidates you want to talk to, faster. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/LOCKEDONCOLLEGE. Terms and conditions apply.FanDuelMake Every Moment More. Right now, NEW customers can bet FIVE DOLLARS and get TWO HUNDRED in BONUS BETS – GUARANTEED. Visit FanDuel.com/LOCKEDON to get started.FANDUEL DISCLAIMER: 21+ in select states. First online real money wager only. Bonus issued as nonwithdrawable free bets that expires in 14 days. Restrictions apply. See terms at sportsbook.fanduel.com. Gambling Problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit FanDuel.com/RG (CO, IA, MD, MI, NJ, PA, IL, VA, WV), 1-800-NEXT-STEP or text NEXTSTEP to 53342 (AZ), 1-888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org/chat (CT), 1-800-9-WITH-IT (IN), 1-800-522-4700 (WY, KS) or visit ksgamblinghelp.com (KS), 1-877-770-STOP (LA), 1-877-8-HOPENY or text HOPENY (467369) (NY), TN REDLINE 1-800-889-9789 (TN) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On today's episode of Locked on Jayhawks, short and long-term takeaways from the Kansas-Oklahoma State game, including the performance of Jason Bean. You are Locked on Jayhawks, your daily podcast on the Kansas Jayhawks, part of the Locked on Podcast Network, your team every day. We'll be right back. you get any of your podcasts. And you can also find us on our YouTube page where you can like and subscribe to the show. Thank you to all the everydayers out there for tuning in to each and every episode. First, today's episode, before we get into our short and long-term takeaways, is brought to you by PrizePix. Go to prizepix.com slash lockedoncollege and use code LOCKEDONCOllege for a first deposit

match up to $100. Daily fantasy sports made easy. All right, so we're going to get into our short and long-term takeaways from the KU-Oklahoma State game. Kansas falls 39-32 to Oklahoma State. We're going to start with the short term, finish with the long term, and get to more on Kansas-Oklahoma. First in the short term.

Obviously, that sucked on Saturday. And, you know, I think KU is still a program and a team who can win a lot of games. But when you're making too many mistakes, when you're shooting yourself in the foot, you're not a program that's going to be able to overcome that right now. You have to kind of play as close to mistake-free football as you can. And to be clear, this is where most of college football is. Most of college football is if you play a clean game that weekend, you're going to win, right? There are very few programs, whether it's your Alabamas,

your Georgias of the world, where it's like, ah, they're so good. They're so much better than the other team that they can play a mistake football game. They can have three turnovers or something, and they're still probably going to win. Maybe it's just a closer game than you were expecting. Ohio State, Michigan, there are certain teams out there where it's, I guess, dependent on no matter what,

you're going to find a way to win. Kansas is in that middle zone where most college football is where, yeah, if you play, if you have a few mistakes here or there, you can overcome it. But if you have way more mistakes than the other, which they kind of did, you had the two turnovers, Oklahoma State had zero. Those are the big ones there. But there are other ways of it happening too,

that that's the difference in the game. And I think Saturday was kind of more proof of that. And we saw that a little bit last year too in some of their losses, like they weren't playing clean football in a lot of the losses. Another short-term takeaway here is Jason Bean had the most Jason Bean game of all time. So you go back to last year. You look at some of the games, whether it's against Baylor or Oklahoma,

second half against TCU, the stats are exhilarating. They jump off the page for Jason Bean. That was the case in this game against Oklahoma State. You throw for four bills, five touchdowns or four touchdowns or five touchdowns. I'm sorry. I mean, just numbers that jump off the page, especially for a backup quarterback. Now, as far as you're trying to maybe determine what leads to winning or losing a football game, interception in the red zone, that's tough. Interception at your own end of the field, that's tough. Unable to score points on the last four drives when really getting a touchdown on any of the four would have sufficed.

Those are tough. So it's very hard to distinguish how you fully evaluate this game. And if you view it, it really depends on the lens you view it from. If you view it from this is your backup quarterback and you got five touchdowns, 400 yards, even with the two interceptions, typically you take that from a backup quarterback, and you got five touchdowns, 400 yards, even with the two interceptions. Typically, you take that from a backup quarterback, and you look across the country, backup quarterbacks are not even coming close to doing those things.

From that lens, it's an A+. But from the lens of making the key plays when it matters at the end of the game, still maybe not having the full trust in terms of, you know, some of the read option game or like at the end of the game, it causes you to use a timeout on fourth and one, because maybe, uh, you didn't fully trust what you were going to get into there offensively. There are certain things or just really struggling over those final few drives. And it's like, well, but if we're just evaluating on its own and forgetting the backup tag, it wasn't good enough.

So it was the most Jason Bean game of – or it was the Jason Bean-iest Jason Bean game because it was everything that we've kind of talked about there when you're talking about the differences with Jalen Daniels and Jason Bean. You basically have to have the precursor that Jason Bean is not Jalen Daniels. But then you also have the precursor of like Jason Bean is still a good quarterback. He's still kind of a middle tier maybe top half of the quarterback in the big 12 it's just the difference between those guys who are average and the top guys are different it's like when you're watching Kirk Cousins versus Patrick Mahomes like Kirk Cousins is a good quarterback but there are a lot of

things that there are shortcomings there whether it it's big moment plays or, you know, struggling in a few areas that differentiate being maybe the 12th best quarterback in the NFL to being the best. Right. And that's kind of where you are, Jason mean, like he's a good enough quarterback to win a lot of games. He's a good quarterback. He's one of the best quarterbacks you've had, if not the best since Todd racing besides Jalen Daniels. The thing is you have to do other things well to make up for that

if it is going to have some shortcomings here or there. And so overall, he played a good enough game to win, but it's unfortunate because you struggled running the football, 3.1 yards per carry. You struggled defensively. You struggled on special teams. And so when you combine all of those things, you didn't need Jason Mean just to play a good game

where he played a good first two and a half quarters. You need a Jason Mean to play a great game where he played three and a half good quarters or four good quarters of football. And maybe that's unfair for him to be thrust into as the backup quarterback, but that's kind of where you're at in this game, which leads to a lot of nuance that overall, like I said, I thought Jason Mean played well, but certainly there was some stuff left on the table that could have taken it to the next level and won you the game,

which is where the nuances had. Short-term worst running game of the season. I guess this could be long-term because maybe it shows that you are vulnerable in some sort of way in terms of your rushing attack that we haven't seen this year. I kind of thought coming into the week that KU was always going to be a team that had at least like 120, 150 rushing yards each and every week, that even the teams that did well defending them, they would still find a way to make it a strength because that's how good they were at it. Well, that wasn't the case in this game. Only 90 yards rushing, 3.1 yards per carry. Maybe that does show you're vulnerable for the future. I don't really think it does. I think this is going to

kind of be the exception to the rule game. You have such a good offensive line, good running backs that I think you should still be able to run the football so much. And I really do look at the game as Oklahoma State put so much attention and numbers forward to stopping the run that it hurt their passing game a lot, that that's a big reason they gave up 400 passing yards and they gave up like three wide open touchdowns, right's because of how much attention they paid to the run so I guess hypothetically another team could do this where they basically put so much numbers and and attention on stopping the run that they're going to give up another 300 350 400 passing yards and I guess that's fine because the output for Kansas can be okay even in that regard but yeah, just not KU's best running game. It was the worst of the year.

I don't expect it to be a long-term thing that matters too much. And last short-term takeaway here, KU's three safeties have been playing as advertised. OJ Burrow's first couple games, maybe a little bit slower, but he's kind of picked it up since then and has played really well since then. Kenny Logan's had a really good season so far. And Marvin Grant has, I think, had a much better season this year

than he had a season ago. Their three safeties are playing as advertised. And, in fact, you look at pro football focus, at least I was looking yesterday. I know they update some of the grades as the week goes on. The top three pro football focus graded defenders for KU were Kenny Logan, Marvin Grant, OJ Burroughs. All three were your safeties,

and all three were your only defenders rated 70 or higher. On one hand, I think this speaks to the talent of that room, and I think it speaks to the flexibility you can have. But I also wonder if you're underutilizing it to a certain standpoint. Like should instead of you playing the sub packages, and we're going to get more on kind of Craig Young here, where Craig Young is staying in as a linebacker kind of DB. Should you just move him over to one of the regular linebacker spots, take one of the regular linebackers out, put another safety on the field since you have three good ones?

And maybe that helps your coverage a little bit. I don't know. There's a real question there, and we'll get into why coming up in some of our long term takeaways. But those are my short-term takeaways from the game. I think another quick short-term takeaway you could have is just that Kansas played good enough to win on the road in the Big 12, which is possibly a good thing, but it goes back in line with number one, that you're still not a program that can overcome internal self-inflicted mistakes.

We're going to continue on to our long-term takeaways here. First, this episode of Locked on Jayhawks is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. These days, every new potential hire can feel like a high-stakes wager for your small business. You want to be 100% certain that you have access to the best qualified candidates available, which is why you have to check out LinkedIn Jobs, finding the right people for your team faster and for free.

Add your job in the purple hashtag hiring frame to your LinkedIn profile to spread the word that you're hiring. Simple tools like screening questions make it easy to focus on the candidates with just the right skills and experience so you can quickly prioritize who you'd like to interview and hire. And you want to add that right team member to finish out the season. I'm sure a lot of college football coaches wish that they could just, like, make a trade or add somebody from the transfer portal from another team

to make that last-second push. They don't have that luxury. You do. It can take some work off your plate or it can just make the entire business better. You want to finish strong here in 2023. Small businesses rate LinkedIn jobs number one in delivering quality hires versus leading competitors.

LinkedIn jobs helps you find the qualified candidates you want to talk to faster. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash locked on college. That's linkedin.com slash locked on college, post your job for free at linkedin.com slash lockedoncollege. That's linkedin.com slash lockedoncollege. Post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. On to our long-term takeaways from Kansas-Oklahoma State. I think Kansas should still be a bowl team.

And, you know, the door does seem open to winning six to eight games, I would say. Probably tough to get to nine. To get to nine at this point, you're looking the door does seem open to winning six to eight games, I would say. Probably tough to get to nine. To get to nine at this point, you're looking at four and one. And when you have Oklahoma, Kansas State, those are two tough ones. Still at home. Winning on the road, as we just saw, is very difficult. So even though Iowa State, although Iowa State's kind of figured it out,

so that becomes a really tough game. And Cincinnati hasn't been great. It's still going to be tough to win on the road, especially in that one that will be senior day too. So, you know, winning nine is going to a really tough game. And Cincinnati hasn't been great. It's still going to be tough to win on the road, especially in that one that will be senior day too. So, you know, winning nine is going to be really tough. Eight is possible. It's there. You're going to probably have to beat Kansas State and Texas Tech to do it

and then win one of two on the road in that scenario to get there. But it's very much possible. I think the most likely at this point is probably winning six to seven games. If you said right now, I think a lot of fans would probably take this. If you said right now, Kansas went, it goes seven and six with the two other wins being a bull win and Kansas state.

I think a lot of people would just say, okay, I'll take it and you know, run for the rest, but there is potential to, you know, win more games than that. Can you go one in one in the other two road games?

Can you go one and two in, you know, your home games or even two and one texas tech looks a little bit better now even though k-state you know who looks really good there i will acknowledge if you somehow upset oklahoma we can go back to the kind of pie in the sky talk about where this can get if you beat oklahoma maybe the opportunity to get to nine wins does become more apparent or eight looks almost like a certainty at that point if you do beat Oklahoma. So that can change things very much. But right now, if you lose to Oklahoma like you're going to be expected to, five and three would be the same record you had to rate games last year.

And then you're at Iowa State who, again, Iowa State's kind of figured things out. I think they've won like three straight Big 12 games or something like that. I mean, they beat Oklahoma State. They just beat Cincinnati pretty handedly this past week. So Iowa State might be getting pretty good. or something like that. I mean, they beat Oklahoma State. They just beat Cincinnati pretty handedly this past week. So Iowa State might be getting pretty good, and is there a chance you get to 5-4, which would actually be a worse record than you were through nine games a season ago.

Another long-term, I'm starting to get a tad worried about the kicking game. This is back-to-back weeks now that you had blocked PATs, and if you just take into account it's three times, because two times against Oklahoma State, once off a bad snap, once off a block, and the block against UCF. That's three times in the past two weeks that you have had issues with the PAT game. Some of the field, I mean, we saw Keller miss a field goal the other week, and some of the field goals have maybe been a little shakier in terms of getting in, but just kind of like barely making it. So I'm starting to worry a little bit about the kicking game,

but maybe they can get that rectified coming off the bye week this week. Another long-term takeaway here. I think the run defense and the defense overall is still better right now. You're giving up a little over 27 points per game, which would be about an eight point per game improvement from where you were a season ago. Obviously you play Oklahoma and Kansas state and Texas tech, some high powered offenses that that number, improvement from where you were a season ago. Obviously, you play Oklahoma and Kansas State and Texas Tech. Some high-powered offenses, those numbers are probably going to go up

by the time the season is all said and done. How much further? I don't know. And I do think the defense, either way, is better than it was last year, and the run defense is better than it was last year. But just how much better is the real question here? And that's the question we had in the offseason. And right now, you've given up three straight games of 200 or more rushing yards the KU linebackers who have mostly been pleased with their progress so far this year still understanding there are going to be some shortcomings there they really

struggled on Saturday here is the run defense grades as of yesterday on KU's linebackers Rich Miller 56 JB Brown 50 Taiwan Berryhill 47 Cordell Wheeler 28 you know linebackers. Rich Miller, 56. J.B. Brown, 50. Tywon Berryhill, 47. Cordell Wheeler, 28. Linebackers aren't the be-all, end-all for the running game. Defensive linemen have to do a good job of either penetrating or keeping blockers off the linebackers. Sometimes the runs go to the outside. It's on the DBs or the safeties. It is a little bit of everyone. But for the most part, the linebackers are kind of center attention

to stopping the run. And all four of your guys really struggled at that on Saturday it wasn't just missed tackles it was missed chances to even try a tackle whether it was going to be a missed tackle or you actually did tackle them because there were a lot of plays where they just cut by you or you took a really bad angle or you know there was the one play that again comes to mind where ollie gordon gets rich miller in the open field and miller a few yards before he's able to engage with him gets kind of juked to the ground right it's just plays like that where um it was certainly a struggle i think to say the least for uh ku tackling and the linebackers in this game so i

my long term i guess negative takeaway here is that even though I think the defense is better than last year, is it going to be good enough for you to get to seven or eight wins? I think that still is kind of a shrug and a question mark. You were so good against UCF, really struggling against Oklahoma State in offense that had struggled coming into the game. My other long-term takeaway, Mello Dotson and Craig Young are going to have a heavy hand in determining just how much of that defensive success happens the rest of the way for KU. So currently, as much as experience

as KU had coming back to the back end, you bring back your top three corners, top three safeties, some other experienced players come in. KU is 10th in conference of the 14 teams in yards allowed per pass. So it's not the worst, but it's definitely much worse than you think, given the personnel and the experience. And it's pretty clear that defenses are more so avoiding Kobe Bryant at this point in time and being picky and choosy of how and when Kobe Bryant gets targeted. And that has led to a ton of targets for Melo Dotson and Craig Young.

Right now, Melo Dotson has the most targets against on KU. Craig Young is second. Rich Miller, I think, is third. And on Saturday, we saw Mello Dotson targeted 11 times. That's a lot. He gave up nine catches on the 11 targets for 101 yards. That's a 105 NFL passer rating. Craig Young, meanwhile, was targeted second most in the Oklahoma State game. He was targeted six times and he gave up five catches for 112 yards and a touchdown. So,

you know, with both these guys, it's pretty clear that offenses are kind of setting things up to go after both of them. And by the way, the NFL passer rating that Craig Young gave up was a 158.3. That is a perfect NFL passer rating. So with Mello, he's now been targeted 42 times this season for 360 yards. His NFL passer rating is still fine there, 79.5, but lately the numbers are skyrocketing, and he's been kind of struggling there, and especially in this Oklahoma State game.

With Craig Young, he's been targeted 28 times this season for 231 yards and two touchdowns for a 113.8 NFL passer rating against. You go over to Kobe Bryant to show you how much they're avoiding him. He was only targeted three times against Oklahoma State. He gave up just eight yards. That's it, on three targets. He's been targeted only 21 times this season. Mello's been targeted double that this year with only 15 for the Kobe Bryant coming in the four big 12 games. So teams are basically saying we're only going to go Kobe. If we really feel like we have the look, we're mostly going to avoid him because we're worried about what's going to happen. And Oklahoma state almost paid the price. There was almost a pick six from Kobe Bryant from the game with Mello. there have been some

struggles there and so teams are basically just overloading i i wonder if ku needs to start double teaming on mellow's side more putting more safety attention there and this goes back in line with kind of what i'm wondering if you know with craig young um are you better off just playing in that hawk position just another defensive back and then moving craig young to one of linebacker spots so that one of your linebacker spots has a better coverage guy and you have a DB in there instead of Craig Young as another linebacker out there. I don't know if that'd be helpful at all. I don't know how you work around this schematically, but certainly the play of both those guys, because they're getting targeted a lot, offenses are looking for them, especially to try to avoid Kobe Bryant. How well they play

over the final five games is very much going to determine the success or the lack thereof of this defense. I'm going to continue on more on Oklahoma. First, this episode of the show is brought to you by PrizePix. PrizePix offers weekly promotions that can lead to big payouts. They even have Taco Tuesdays going on. Each Tuesday, PrizeP discounts, select player projections up to 25% off to provide even more value. Prize picks now offers Apple pay for quick and easy deposits into your account this football season. And I know it's very easy to deposit or pull out your money. Cause I've done it myself.

You go to prize picks.com slash locked on college and use code locked on college for a first deposit match up to $100. That's prize picks.com slash LockedOnCollege with the code LockedOnCollege for a first deposit match up to $100. PrizePix Daily Fantasy Sports made easy. More on what's next. KU takes on Oklahoma State or Oklahoma, excuse me, after the bye week. So the Sooners are going to come in right now. They are seventh on ESPN SP+.

Their top five team in the country with, you know, some of the polls Right now they are 7th on ESPN SP+. They're a top-five team in the country with some of the polls out there. 5th on offense on ESPN SP+, 23rd on defense. But the defense has been really impressive. Texas scored 30, which Texas obviously has a really good offense. We saw that firsthand for Kansas. Texas put up 30 on the Oklahoma defense. No one else has scored more than 20 points on this Sooners defense and they have 12 interceptions this year. So they are a ball hawking defense. They are multiple.

They'll get a lot of sacks. They'll get a lot of pressure, a lot of unique blitzes, and they get a lot of interceptions too. A little bit scary for Bean coming off a two interception performance. He also had two picks last year against Oklahoma. Offensively for Oklahoma, they're elite, but they are a little bit more inconsistent. I know fifth on ESPN SP Plus here. They've had games of 28 points against SMU and 20 against Cincinnati, where they were a little up and down. Dylan Gabriel, though, can carve you apart.

And when he's on, it's tough to slow down. We saw that last year in Norman against Oklahoma. This is going to be the toughest game remaining on KU's schedule. It helps you're coming off the bye week. It helps it's homecoming. You should have a strong crowd in attendance, but going to be really tough to take down this Sooner squad.

Lance Leipold in his time at KU has done well against Oklahoma. 12-point loss, 10-point loss in the two years, both competitive games, especially that game in Memorial two years ago. Oklahoma may be sleepwalking a bit in that one. We'll see how much they sleepwalk coming into this one. You might need some of that, and you're going to need, certainly, a positive turnover deferential in this one, unlike how the last game went. That'll do it for this episode of Locked on Jayhawks.

We're going to have some KU basketball talk later in the week. We'll also have some pro football focus grades overall in the season that maybe stick out, and we'll get to that coming up later with locked on Jayhawks. You've been listening to the show. You can find us anywhere. You get any of your podcasts or our YouTube page. Have a great rest of your day.