Film Study: Duggan's huge targets, TCU defense luck and Kansas pressure

I've gone through the film, and there are a lot of reasons for Jayhawk fans to be encouraged about today's game against the Horned Frogs.

After the results from last week, I saw a lot of chatter about how Iowa State had "solved" the offense of the Kansas Jayhawks. Plus, a lot of people gave the TCU Horned Frogs defense a LOT of credit for shutting down Oklahoma.

So I decided I had to go back and look at the tape for myself. I went through every play of both the Kansas and TCU games from this last week (after some big technical issues finally got resolved). There are a lot of things that the prevailing narratives are missing.

To be clear, things that I point out below are not meant to be absolutes. In fact, when I say below that the TCU defense benefitted from a lot of unforced errors, I'm not saying that they don't deserve ANY credit for the way they played. Instead, I'm just showing video evidence of some of the things that some people are worried about.

The TCU defense was never really tested

Remember what I said about absolutes? This is one of them. Sure, they passed their test against Oklahoma with flying colors. But instead of being a comprehensive final exam, this was more like an open book take home quiz.

Even before he was knocked out of the game, he was playing poorly. He overthrew multiple open receivers despite not really being pressured much of the game.

And when he left, Davis Beville didn't do any better when he decided to throw.

So while it doesn't negate the great performance from TCU, it does help to dull the worry about TCU shutting down a high-functioning offense.

The Jayhawks stopped their own passing game

I was wondering just how much Iowa State did to keep Jalon Daniels from getting going in the passing game. And looking at it, most of the big stops came because Jalon took a deep shot without being pressured and flat out missed it.

And among all of those, we still saw plenty of times where he was spot on.

And of course, if that's not enough, here are a bunch of great plays that our defense made. I'm willing to bet we see some of those today.

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