Texas Tech football: 3 Kansas offensive players Red Raiders have to stop
If the Texas Tech football team is going to come up with its first road win of the season Saturday in Lawrence, these three Jayhawks offensive weapons must be kept in check.
It’s late October so naturally, the attention of most people in and around Lawrence, Kansas has already left the gridiron and turned to the hardwood where the Jayhawks are again the preseason favorites to capture the Big 12. But Saturday night, the Texas Tech football team will find itself in the shadows of Allen Fieldhouse trying to bring home the season’s fourth win in front of a crowd that might not top the one that will be on hand for the first basketball home game in Lawrence next month.
When Matt Wells leads his team onto the field against KU, he will finally be facing one of the three other new head coaches in the conference this year, Les Miles. The former LSU and Oklahoma State head coach was hired before the 2018 season even ended and unlike Wells, his arrival brought with him plenty of notoriety on a national scale.
The quirky, humorous, and often unpredictable head coach has already accomplished something in Lawrence that we haven’t seen another coach manage to do in a decade…give people outside of the Sunflower State a reason to pay attention to KU football.
People aren’t paying attention because the product on the field has been markedly better than what we’ve ween from the Jayhawks in the last ten years, but because the experiment of bringing a wacky but successful coach with a national title on his resume out of retirement to rebuild one of the most woebegone programs in the nation is fasciating. In some ways, it is reminiscent of the Kliff Kingsbury experiment Texas Tech conducted from 2013-18 in the sense that both schools gambled that the power of persona would reward a coaching hire that was against convention.
We know all too well how Tech’s experiment played out and thus far, the Les Miles experiment is not having a tremendous impact in the win column. Granted, sitting at 2-5 overall makes this just the sixth time since 2011 that the program has won more than one game in a season and with one more win, KU will equal the most wins it has had in one year since 2009.
But let’s not get carried away. Those two wins were less than monumental. To open the season, Miles’ team had to score in the final minutes to beat FCS opponent Indiana State and in week-three, it handed Boston College a 48-24 loss, the first road win for KU against a Power 5 team since 2008. But don’t confuse BC for a program that is among the elite of the ACC.
In between those wins was a humiliating loss to Coastal Carolina in Lawrence, 12-7. Big 12 play has been unkind as well as KU has gone 0-4 with losses to West Virginia, TCU, Oklahoma, and Texas.
It is that most recent game against the Longhorns that has caught the attention of Texas Tech fans. Last Saturday in Austin, Kansas held a one-point lead over the Horns until UT drilled the game-winning field goal on the final play of the game. But in the 50-48 loss, KU may have discovered a new offensive identity.
With Brent Dearmon promoted to offensive coordinator after spending the first six games of the year as a senior offensive analyst, Kansas racked up 569 yards overall and put 24 points on the scoreboard in a back-and-forth 4th quarter that saw the two teams combine for 50 points.
The difference seemed to be a shift from a pro-style offense to a spread attack that gave the KU athletes some room to operate in space and get to the edge of the defense. That’s a change from the first six games when the Jayhawks seemed intent on running between the tackles.
Thus, it is tough to analyze what the Kansas offense really is. For the season, KU is 9th in the Big 12 in scoring offense (26.4 points per game) and 8th in total offense (385.1 yards per game). KU sits at No.7 in the league in rushing (173 yards per game) and 8th in passing (212.1) so expect the ball to stay on the ground quite a bit this weekend, which is good for a Red Raider secondary that ranks second-to-last in the Big 12 against the pass.
With a new coordinator pulling the strings of the offense, it will be tough for the Red Raider defense to know exactly what KU wants to do this week because there is only one game of film on Dearmon’s offense. But what we do know is that Tech will have to focus its attention on the following offensive weapons to avoid being torched the way the Longhorns were.