It’s Kansas on Senior Night in Norman. While the Jayhawks have improved this season, they are still just an awful football team. I know things have been shaky after the Tech and OSU debacles, but this Kansas team is going to be athletically and schematically overwhelmed. If the Sooners can’t blow out this team, they don’t deserve to be the Playoff, simple as that. The game is important in the sense that OU needs to win big and stay healthy going into next week’s showdown in Morgantown.
Meet the Jayhawks:
Things are looking up in Lawrence. After an embarrassing home loss to Nichols to open the season, the Jayhawks picked up two big non-conference wins against Central Michigan and Rutgers, as well as a rare conference win against the dumpster fire TCU Horned Frogs. While Kansas has improved, they did just fire head coach David Beaty, who is finishing out the season with the team.
Who to Watch For:
RB Pooka Williams Jr.
A few off-seasons ago, Kansas had a bizarre stretch where they established a legit recruiting pipeline to Louisiana, grabbing several four stars en route to a temporary #1 ranking in the Big 12. While it naturally fell apart, probably when the recruits remembered “oh yeah, they’ve gone 2-22 in the past two seasons”, there were a few stragglers.
That star of those stragglers is true freshman tailback Pooka Williams Jr., who has quietly become one of the best backs in the Big 12. Williams is a versatile back who can catch out of the backfield. He is young and doesn’t have much help, but after seeing what OSU’s Chubba Hubbard did against the Sooners on Saturday, you can see why this guy can be dangerous.
Series History: 75-17-6 (Oklahoma)
The Jayhawks have only beaten the Sooners six times since 1965 and twice since the Big Eight became the Big 12. While it’s a pretty unremarkable football history, I hold an enormous distain for the Jayhawks due to the basketball history.
Growing up a massive OU basketball fan in the days of Hollis Price, Kelvin Sampson and Tog Dawg, my early days were spent with the Sooners perennially in the Final Four hunt. And who was the biggest hurdle annually, but the Kansas Jayhawks.
I despised KU. My Dad truly taught how to hate the Jayhawks from an early age, telling me tales of how Danny Manning and the 1988 team robbed the Sooners of a national title, something I’m still convinced of. One of my favorite early sports memories was watching Bucknell knock off Kansas in the first round of an NCAA Tournament in the Ford Center. Hell, I even didn’t like Nick Collison for awhile when he got to the Oklahoma City Thunder purely on the grounds of him being a Jayhawk. Kansas always seems to pop up and antagonize me, from them spoiling an all-time classic Buddy Hield game in 2016, to almost killing me with free beer and chilly temperatures last season. I’ll always harbor a grudge against them, no matter how little sense it makes.
Saturday is my last Dad’s Day as a student and I’m already excited to spend it with my dad, irrationally hating on a team for a sport that isn’t even being played.
The Schooner Blog 