Kansas Reaffirmed Football Growth in Nevada Win
Kansas won a sloppy, ugly game late on Saturday in Nevada against one of the worst teams in DI. It was a game most Kansas fans are fine moving on from instead of thinking about any more as they try to catch up on the sleep they missed from the after-midnight ending.
But strangely, this game made me feel better about where the Jayhawks are and how far Lance Leipold and staff have brought this team. Why? Because Nevada is the 2023 equivalent of KU teams in the 2010s.
Now, that sentence likely made you go “That makes me feel worse, moron.” And I get it. Though the fact that you are disgusted over a touchdown win on the road is part of the argument of growth.
Like you, I watched those Kansas teams during the 2010s where everything had to go right for KU and wrong for the opponent and then maybe they had a chance at an upset, but still the other team usually just had too much talent to let the Jayhawks win. And because I had watched KU play that role for so long, it was easier to identify that the Jayhawks are now on the other side.
Nevada fumbled five times and recovered all of them. It was a late start 1,500 miles away — the first road game of the year at that and against a team it is incredibly difficult to take seriously as an opponent when they had lost 12 straight games — and two of Kansas’ starters had to sit the first half because of targeting calls the game before. KU also uncharacteristically committed as many penalties as it did in the first two games combined. Some of it was self-induced struggle, but that’s what happens with college sports. Kids in their late teens and early 20s are going to have days when it doesn’t go well and you lose. Even Alabama can look hideous in a win, as it did against USF on Saturday.
And yet, I always felt confident that Kansas was likely going to win. KU has gone from the team where everything must go right to the team that can overcome everything going wrong because it is just better than those bottom-dwellers. When you think of how drastic that is from even five years ago, the transformation is pretty incredible.
The Jayhawks have made the long, hard trek from the bottom to the middle, where moral victories are becoming fewer and further between and the fan base can expect more and no longer be satisfied with just keeping it close.
The Illinois win showed how Kansas can exert its will when it’s clicking. Nevada showed that it can still take care of business when nothing is going right. Illinois gave a sense of the ceiling (even if the Illini maybe aren’t as good as we thought), while Nevada made it clear how much the floor has been raised.
