Memphis Blues

Source: KU Sports

Like the delinquent kid in your 8th grade European History class who you had thought at this point, after all the parent-teacher-student interventions, all the extra attention before and after class, all the hours spent tutoring, cajoling, encouraging, wheedling, and incentivizing, would have made some positive progress, some sign of a pulse, of pride, of self-respect, still failed to turn in his daily assignment--for the SEVENTH year in a row-- Kansas football continues to let its ever-dwindling fan-base down. Which raises the subsequent questions: can things get even worse? Hadn't we already hit rock-bottom? And if not yet, WHEN, for crying out loud? This stuff is old. It smells bad. Find it a home in the dump.


I concede. It would be embarrassingly naive to expect a 180-degree turnaround out of KU football from futility to excellence. Utterly ignorant. Except the problem is that throughout all the years of unwatchable football (and I am in full sobriety to all involved in the program in saying it is unwatchable) nobody has asked for this! Nobody expected a quick-fix. Charlie Weis, yes. But the reasonable person, no. If you polled those still remotely aware of the program's existence, a smashing majority would be satisfied with semi-competitive football. Each college football team gets 12 games. We'd ask for A (1, one, uno) win. Maybe 2 (1 more than 1, two, dos). We'll take our lashes from Oklahoma and Baylor, sure. But for the games remaining, that's 8, give us something for at least a half. Maybe three quarters. At bare minimum, we need Billy to hand in a half-completed take-home quiz. By the time's standards, it is still extraordinarily poor performance. But dammit, it's better than the day before. And we can tell and appreciate the difference between 1-11 with 9 blow-outs, and 1-11 with 2. Tangible headway.

We don't ask for, we don't beg for, we don't plead for, WE DEMAND one game without a botched quarterback and or holder/center exchange. Just one. At any level of football (pee-wee included), this is positively inexcusable. Across the country, high school athletes lose their starting jobs due to gaffes like these. At Kansas, no harm; no foul. So long as you apologize to your team, apparently. This is unequivocally embarrassing. I approach every Saturday with dread. Or brace myself by watching looking to laugh, instead of enjoying competition, like I would at Phil Dunphy. Or Cam.

Kansas's 43-7 loss to Memphis on Saturday was just another day of Billy's antics. Thumb firmly up his you know what.

Luckily, I didn't watch. I was road-tripping to a wedding and following on my phone. Discretion is the better part of valor, they say, and my blood pressure probably benefited most from having abstained from the television. It's the first KU football game that I can remember not watching/listening to in some time. Now having watched a replay and glossed over stat lines, I am emboldened to say that it was not far from what we see repeatedly. Bad offense. Average defense facing bleak starting positions. A special teams unit that was pieced together with bailing wire and duct tape.

On Tuesday, David Beaty flew to the defense of Sheahon Zenger. Don't bite the hand that feeds (hires) you. Both are on the hot-seat in my opinion. I don't like seeing people lose their job, but I'd rather see that than know that there are better qualified people out there who have missed an opportunity to people who are incapable.

It's still early in Beaty's go at it. He cited improvement statisically across the board. Kind of like polishing a turd. If you have to explain to the media that you're better, you're probably not. We have eyes, David. The product should sell itself.

To Beaty's credit, we have seen some young players contributing. His unrelenting allegiance to Montell Cozart's slop aside, Khalil Herbert looks promising (60+ yard touchdown run when Kansas needed it early), Mike Lee is a freshman cornerback who doesn't play like one, and Dorance Armstrong is a beast and a half. Beaty can get some Big 12 bodies in here. But offensive execution is absent. I will be a broken record all year long, but it takes 11 in three phases to win a football game. The offense routinely goes with 9.

If Montell Cozart starts another football game for this program ever, I will write David Beaty off. Another failed hire. Montell Cozart is the worst quarterback to play for Kansas in my lifetime. Nothing about him as a person. The guy is not a Big 12 quarterback. It is not in his DNA.

Back in 2014, I wrote a column for the Daily Kansan underlining Sheahon Zenger's failings. It did not run in the paper. I'll rehash a few of my points now. But frankly, I'm tired. This stuff wears on you.

1) Basketball is self-sustained. It will win regardless of the A.D.
2) Football is the money-maker. An average football program would bring in more revenue than KU basketball as it sits.
3) We all enjoy non-revenue sports having success. Volleyball is a tremendous story. It's just that three letter word that comes before revenue makes all the difference. Non.
4) Zenger's success/failure at Kansas rides solely on David Beaty. His second hire at Kansas. Beaty's time has been short here, but Zenger's has not. As Tom Keegan wrote in a column this week, if Kansas loses out in 2016 (which looks highly likely), "Zenger's five-year record overseeing football coaches that he hired [would be] 8-52, the worst five-year stretch in the history of Kansas football." Kansas wins 14% of the games it plays. 8% of those games come against FCS opponents. 8% of those games come against Iowa State. 16% of those games come against non-conference opponents Kansas should beat. The math doesn't add up. Under Zenger, Kansas basically beats the team it pays a half-million dollars to play, and nobody else.

With Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little stepping down from her post this coming summer, and a "pile of crap" (Charlie Weis, you will forever haunt my dreams) continuing to fester on the football field, a shake up is looming.

But does anybody care?