Coming off a thrilling victory over Baylor, the Kansas football team looked to be in line for another win this past weekend against TCU . The Jayhawks shut out the Horned Frogs in the first half and were winning 13-0 halfway through the third quarter.
But in typical fashion of a Lance Leipold-coached team
, that promising start quickly evaporated after a few boneheaded mistakes. Some can be pinned on the coaches and others on the players, but overall, it was a collective meltdown by everyone involved.
It all started during KU's second offensive drive of the second half. Following a three-and-out forced by the Jayhawks' defense, backup quarterback Cole Ballard orchestrated a successful drive and worked his way into TCU territory thanks to an incredible 44-yard snag by Nahzae Cox. With nine minutes remaining in the quarter, the offense had a golden opportunity from the TCU six-yard line with four plays to punch it in.
An incompletion and two unsuccessful runs later, though, Leipold was faced with a fourth-down play from the two. It felt like an obvious decision to keep the offense on the field given the Jayhawks' aggressiveness in recent games on fourth downs. Andy Kotelnicki dialed up a QB power run for Ballard up the middle but he couldn't find an open crease, coming up short and pinning TCU at its own one.
Inherently, there was nothing wrong with going for it there. You could argue that kicking a chip shot to make it 16-0 (though Martin Connington had already missed from 26 yards out) would be understandable when your starting signal-caller is hurt and the defense was rolling, but it's hard to criticize Leipold when that's become the identity of his group.
Leipold cited "aggression" and "analytics" to justify that decision in his postgame press conference. The next opportunity that arose on fourth down raised even more questions, however.
Once TCU punted it away after another three-and-out, the KU offense followed that up with another fruitless possession. Facing a fourth-and-5 from TCU's 39-yard line, Leipold trotted the offense back onto the field once again to convert. That gamble couldn't have played out any worse for the Jayhawks.
An unblocked blitzer came in from the left side, forcing Ballard to scramble to his right and rush a throw. A pass deflection from a TCU defender somehow ended up in the arms of Max Carroll, who ran it back 60 yards for a pick-6 to cut the deficit to six points. From then on, Jayhawk fans knew how the outcome was going to unfold.
For many years, the fanbase has gotten on Leipold for not being aggressive enough . Yet in the past few weeks, his willingness to take risks has backfired far too much. Up 13-0 with a little over 20 minutes to play, what logic went into the thinking to try a fourth-and-medium to potentially give an anemic Horned Frogs offense a short field to start their next drive?
That sequence of failing to find paydirt on four consecutive plays on a goal-to-go series, then the baffling call that resulted in TCU's first points of the afternoon, told the story of this loss and encapsulated this coaching staff in general. As we've learned in past years, the reason the Jayhawks falter so often in close contests is not because of a talent disparity on the field but rather an inability to keep the players disciplined on game day.
These recurring issues are ultimately why so many people are calling for Leipold to be fired after the season. It would be nice if fans didn't have to walk away from every loss thinking of the "what-ifs" had the coaching staff not gotten in its own way. Being physically overmatched is one thing, but the inexplicable blunders that Leipold's teams are prone to are becoming more glaring every year.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com/college/kansas as Evaluating the Sequence That Ultimately Doomed Kansas Football vs. TCU .
