Week 2: West Virginia

PERMISSION TO DREAM

How can I even begin to start this piece?

Last week was all about a return to traditions and the reflections of personal and familial histories in a stadium that means a lot to me watching a team that means a lot to me in a recursive genre of football game, the week 1 FCS tune-up game, finding comfort in familiarity and ritual and feeling measured, cautious optimism about the season ahead.

Within that measured, cautious optimism, I felt that the Kansas Jayhawks’ trip to Morgantown, West Virginia to play the Mountaineers of WVU would be, to quote myself from last week: “competitive” and “an engaging shootout” but the Mountaineers would “pull away in the fourth quarter, probably like 56-45 or something like that.” This was inaccurate, but more accurate than it had any right to be! You cannot deny that this was a competitive and engaging shootout which ended with a double digit victory for a team whose point total ended in the mid-fifties and the other whose point total ended in the forties. 

I was prepared to talk about measured optimism and slow, steady improvement and not getting rattled in a road environment and competence and looking like a team in the Big XII conference, I had so many methods prepared with which to say “I yearn for victories but I have to identify the steps that this team has taken forward” this season, this was when I was prepared to break that out for the first time. I was not at all prepared to write about a road win over West Virginia in week two. I am still not prepared. I have no idea what to put here. I didn’t think I’d write about the Jayhawks with a 2-0 record for the first time since 2011, a win in the conference opener for the first time since 2009, and a win in West Virginia for the first time ever (I was hoping I’d be able to say, like, the first time since 1941, but that’s not the case, we’ve never won in West Virginia. Not even in 1941, that was a 21-0 shutout by the Mountaineers). I have no practice writing about a win in which the Kansas Jayhawks held their own and genuinely outclassed the other team on offense.

I had no idea how to act during the game, even. I suppose that’s where I can start. The original plan was to watch in the yard outside of my friend Ben’s house. He was going to bring his TV outside and we’d set up lawn chairs and enjoy a nice September Saturday with the Kansas Jayhawks. This plan was derailed by storms, so we ended up in his living room, though I like the idea of moving the setup outside and I hope we follow through on it when weather permits. 

I end up getting there late as well. I was convinced until I walked into his living room at 6:15 and saw West Virginia lining up to try for the extra point to go up 14-0 that the game was supposed to start at 7. That was not the case. Ben told me that the Jayhawks looked terrible, committing penalties and giving up huge run and pass plays. We’d gone down a touchdown by the Mountaineers’ fourth play from scrimmage, we’d just gone down another, the stage and script were set for a typical KU football Saturday, another blowout, we’d probably watch until half and then decide to do something else. 

I recognized long ago that my feelings of disappointment and my feelings of complacency with this team have coalesced. Flipping on the second game of the season in the middle of the first quarter and recognizing that it’s going to be a blowout no longer genuinely disappoints me, I’ve come to expect it with repetition. The last time that I was truly disappointed during the second game of the season was the Central Michigan game in 2017, a game I genuinely expected KU to control, the one I thought would represent the Jayhawks’ first step towards consistent competence under David Beaty, and it really, really was not that. That was the game that prompted me to get the figurative safety razor out and start figuratively cutting across my figurative wrists to literal Los Campesinos and Hawthorne Heights songs:

It is now no longer possible to be too pessimistic when it comes to Jayhawk football, and it is your responsibility to be wary of that. Next time you think “Oh, I think Kansas will beat this team, they’re really on a downswing”, or “KU matches up well against this team” (the links are incidental, but I keep seeing this sentiment about particular teams among fans), just remember the name on the front of the jersey and the bird on the helmet and temper your expectations a little bit.

“Swan Dive to Estuary/Selling Rope” is a song about falling short of promises and watching as alibis and lies come to fruition as exactly what they are. This was the game where that happened. KU came into this game favored by a touchdown and lost by eighteen.

This was the first game since 2014 where I thought, from kickoff, that Kansas would win the game. It wasn’t like a “we might have a good chance” feeling, or a “cautiously optimistic” feeling, but just a nice “I’ll be disappointed if KU loses this by eighteen” feeling. I based the prediction for this game on one decent game against Southeast Missouri, one good win against Texas last year, and a whole lot of false hope based off of a coaching staff that didn’t back it up in this game.

I promise you that I will not write something like this at any point this season, though I’ll admit that I miss being that despondent about the Beloved Jayhawks of Football, there is something pure about how hurt I’d get back then, hurt enough to apparently completely misinterpret a song very nakedly about suicide to fit the subject. 

I didn’t get nearly that close this Saturday night, but I could’ve gone right down that path. I’d already felt some of the standard bitterness surrounding college football on the national scale. I watched the entirety of the second half of Texas/Alabama, a game in which Texas nearly came out victorious but ultimately failed as their offense couldn’t slam shut the many doors nudged nearly entirely to the jamb by their defense, eventually succumbing to a few incredible plays by a spectacularly talented quarterback and some… let’s say ‘missed’ calls by the officials. I must say I smelt something there, though I have little sympathy for Texas. I have this moment every year, when I recognize that we’re getting basically the same few teams in the College Football Playoff as we always seem to and it’s going to be a boring year at the top level and you can’t get invested in hoping for any scenario which requires Alabama or Ohio State or Georgia to lose because it simply won’t happen, they’ve figured the game out, they’ve perfected it, they won’t get beaten, there is no spontaneity, no joy, no excitement at the top, and it’s better to appreciate what is there outside of that rather than trying to rekindle a magic on the national scene that has been more or less fully snuffed out in the past decade. Cinderella will not make it to the ball, there’s little chance she even makes it out of the laundry room.

I acknowledge the humor in a loss by the Texas Longhorns prompting this in me, I also acknowledge the humor in me having this realization shortly before Appalachian State and Marshall got wins over top ten teams.

Typically, I come to this realization in mid-October, so getting it out of the way on September 10th actually portends something good for the rest of this season. This general college football bitterness melded well with the more specific Kansas football bitterness. I was ready to have a total pity party, just Ben and I getting more and more frustrated for an hour and a half until we got bored, turned the game off at half, and played Gamecube for the remainder of the evening.

Then there was a touchdown drive by KU. Ben had told me that the first ten minutes had been penalty-ridden, evident of an overmatched, undisciplined team. The offense I saw on that drive, who brought the score to 14-7, looked like they belonged there. Perhaps that first one was a young team dealing with the jitters of their first road game of the season, but regardless of what they’d done up to that point, this drive reflected a confident, deserving team. We celebrated the first KU touchdown.

The Mountaineers scored and made it 21-7. We scored to make it 21-14. They scored again to make it 28-14. At this point, with only three minutes left in the second half, something of an unease found its way into the room. If they just traded touchdowns for the rest of the game, we’d be in an odd purgatorial situation where we’d have to keep watching for the whole game, regardless of if we felt there was a real chance for KU to pull any closer than 7. The hope would never fully be dashed enough for us to justify looking elsewhere, but it’d never really manifest itself in an honest chance for a KU win.

Last year, I developed a sort of system for myself to determine how long I’d remain invested in a game: I’d watch the first quarter, and if the differential was within two scores, I’d continue watching. At half, if it was within three scores, I’d watch the third quarter. If we ever went down by more than three scores, I gave myself permission to do something else. I never had to deal with a game like we figured we were getting into at any point last season, one about 30% of the way on the scale between futility and success. They only had about three minutes once the score hit 28-14, but they’d been moving with some efficiency, and they kept moving with some efficiency on this drive. Once they passed midfield on a pass to fullback Jared Casey, we both started doing the mental math… A score here, then we’d get the ball back at half, and if we scored then… It’d be tied.

And then they scored! We entered halftime with a shared sense of what could be the defining two words of this whole project – Measured optimism. We flipped to another game, I think Pitt/Tennessee, but got sidetracked talking about licensed video game soundtracks of the early 2000s. Madden NFL 2005, SSX Tricky, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit II, that sort of thing. Very interesting topic to look into, a lot of them have Spotify playlists dedicated to them. Did you know that Uncle Kracker’s soft rock big hits were something of a departure from his typical output in the early 2000s? The two songs Ben played for me off the Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit II soundtrack are illustrative of that. 

We were so worked up about this that we didn’t realize we’d need to flip back until the second half had already begun. We put the game back on as Jalon Daniels handed off to Daniel Hishaw at the 3 yard line for the tying touchdown. 

At this point we both went into something of a mental DEFCON state, neither of us knew what to do. We have to consider this in multiple contexts, not just this being a single game, but a game taking place at a specific point in the season. KU gets about one conference win per year ever since 2018 or so, but they’ve all come late in the year, at home (save for last season’s), after the season as a whole was well-past put to bed. Both the conference opener, for one, which we haven’t won since Iowa State in 2009, and the more specific conference road opener, which we haven’t won since… well, Iowa State in 2008, have spelled death for the Jayhawks, and I don’t think they’ve even been competitive in a conference opener on the road since then. I’ve never had this specific experience – and, yes it’s specific, but no so specific, a fair share of teams are at least competitive in their conference opener every year, I’m talking about not getting blown out in a situation like this and it’s just never happened in my adult life, neither of ours! We had prepared ourselves to sit and watch this game and then do something else when it got too out-of-hand, that’s what we know how to do. 

The best analogy I can come up with in a physical sense is the feeling I got when I smoked my first of what I think is three total cigarettes in my adult life at the age of 23. Uncomfortably buzzed, nearly fully formed adult brain, thinking the feeling is probably good, at least it resembles something good, but it’s so new and so unnatural and there was all this energy and edge all at once and I had to pace around my friend Michael’s apartment and everything. We were both pacing here, asking “what do we do?” I know the answer is that we were supposed to watch the game and support the team, but on a philosophical level the newfound feelings of confidence and stability that we got from seeing this offense run, while welcome, were just not natural for us. I hope that I get to learn what to do as the year goes on!

AND THEN KU TOOK THE GODDAMN LEAD

At this point we were out of it, we were fucking flying, I had my mouth agape and everything. We started talking about beating Houston next week, we started talking about the expected scope of this particular post on this particular blog, which I expected perhaps to break four digits in word count at most but is now firmly past 2300 words and we’re not even to the most dramatic part of the contest yet, we discussed the capacity of Memorial Stadium is and how many people might come out to the game if KU is 3-0 heading into week four against Duke, how this game would give the Jayhawk faithful “Permission to Dream,” a phrase we kept repeating over the remainder of the evening, I will take credit for it myself, though Googling showed me it was the name of a from what I can tell fairly unsuccessful memoir published in 2021 that I may have seen on the shelves at a Barnes and Noble or somewhere like that and it might’ve stuck in my mind unintentionally. This past decade, that’s all we’ve been searching for, Permission to Dream, baby, and if we were to pull it off against West Virginia, we’d have it, we’d all have it. Permission to Dream. Permission to Dream.

We forced a field goal, then scored again. KU had an eleven point lead in Morgantown, West Virginia with a little over ten minutes left in the game. I never got to the point where I was just unfazed and unafraid about the result. Our defense had still barely stopped JT Daniels and Bryce Ford-Wheaton, the deluge which had opened up over Milan Puskar Stadium seemed to do as much to slow down the Mountaineers’ pass attack as our defense had, and to their credit, they drove down the field, then had 4th and goal from the one yard-line… Before two penalties pushed them back and forced the field goal, which really should be the defining story of this game. Their team looked further outmatched and less disciplined than ours, and I was baffled by a few of Neal Brown’s decisions, in particular his dedication to the run late in the game. I started to understand what it felt like for fans on the other side of the field, to see Charlie Weis on our sideline and understand his hubris might work in the opposition’s advantage.

With an eight-point lead, KU had a drive stall. Jalon Daniels was stopped one yard short of the first down that would have sealed it. I figured we might go for it, that was the case in 2021 in a very similar situation late with a lead against Texas, but I figure the memory of failing to convert in that game and immediately giving up the game-tying touchdown prompted Leipold to punt. They had 85 yards to go. 

With every first down, the mood sank severely in the room. We started the drive nervous and had begun making jokes gesturing at self-immolation after JT Daniels (yes, it has been annoying trying to make sense of the two J. Daniels so far, not enough that I feel like imbibing the elixir distilled by another J. Daniels) had a pass batted up in the air, which fell into the arms of Kaden Prather, who got them across midfield up to about the KU twenty. 

At that point, acting on the logic I typically have to bring to KU football games (something random went our way, it’s fate, it’s meant to be, it has to happen), I figured the game was going to overtime and they had all the energy and momentum behind them at home and they’d pull it off. If plays like that were going for them at this point, there was a hand of god or the stars and the full moon and mercury (who I have heard is in retrograde) and the Santa Ana winds was fucking with everything and tilting the scales towards West Virginia coming through with this. At that point it started to creep into my head that I’d have to write about it, and I could acknowledge that a loss would probably bring the more interesting (maybe even easier?) writing out of me at the cost of emotional anguish on this Saturday night. I started hearing Spalding Gray’s voice in my head again. They scored the touchdown, converted the two-point conversion, kicked it short, using the wetness of the field to their advantage, pinning us deep in the backfield, Daniels knelt and we went to overtime.

I know you’re supposed to want the team to go on defense first, but I kind of prefer the stress impact of starting on offense in overtime. You don’t have to worry about anything but scoring a touchdown, and, credit to KU, they did. The most important play of overtime in terms of my assessment of the team was the second play, when Jalon Daniels had an open receiver, Tanaka Scott, on a post route basically at the goal line. Daniels missed him, it was an inaccurate throw, a perfect playcall and a poor throw, the opportunity was right there and they missed it. In the past, I think that would be the play that I would’ve turned over in my bed thinking about, the perfect opportunity missed, what could have been, what could have been, what could have been. It was 3rd and 5, inevitably the next play would be a bad snap or a sack, probably make the field goal, then they’d score in overtime and win. It appeared to head that way, Daniels had to check down on a play action pass to Torry Locklin, who was nearly lateral to him, who made the catch but lost yards. That might have even been long for a field goal in the rain like this. The chance was missed, the game was over, I could see the guillotine hanging over our heads.

Then I saw two or three flags thrown in the direction of the scrum around Daniels, followed by a cut to Daniels being lifted up off the ground while giving a thumbs-up to the sideline. He’d been roughed. The replay shows as much, though I’m sure it seems like a soft call to any WV fans. KU was able to convert on a pass from Daniels to Quentin Skinner in the back of the endzone, and we had the lead again.

I had my arms up in the air, the vocalization was more of a “woohoo!” than a screech of excitement or anything. I assumed the dam would have to burst at some point, they’d probably score easily, then either convert the two-point conversion or just outlast us. I had an anxious flash, remembering the horrible affair which was the meeting between my other team, the San Diego State Aztecs, playing against Utah last season at “home” in Dignity Health Sports Park in Carson, California, a game which went into four overtimes. At some point with new overtime rules adopted for the 2021 season, the two teams trade off on two-point conversion plays from the two-yard line, which feels like the equivalent of sudden death penalty kicks in soccer, kind of fitting for that game in that stadium. My other sports love, the only one about as close to my heart as the Jayhawks of football are, Sporting Kansas City, is very adept at going to penalty kicks in big games, but I hate the experience of watching those and the idea of connecting those to the Kansas Jayhawks is something I hope I never have to go through, or at least I didn’t want to go through it on this Saturday night. 

I assumed it was coming, though. I had no belief that this defense would be able to stop Daniels and Ford-Wheaton, they hadn’t been able to throughout the fourth quarter, they’d barely even pressured him, until the second play of WV’s overtime possession: Daniels was pressured, nearly got sacked, but just barely got the ball out towards a receiver, it hit the ground, incomplete, and it didn’t appear to be grounding… But the whistle didn’t blow, and a KU player dove on the ball… and the graphic on the screen didn’t change… and the commentators were no help…¹

Were they calling that a fumble? Did we just win the game?

I stood up and we both yelled in excitement, an excitement tempered by the confusion of the whole thing because the ball looked to have gone forward, and the referee was already on the field to announce they were reviewing it, but the initial replays seemed to show a defender coming down on Daniels’ arm and potentially forcing the ball out. Admittedly I have only a surface level understanding of concepts such as fumbles and tuck rules and incomplete passes but to my also admittedly biased eyes it appeared to be a fumble to me, it looked like Daniels lost control of the ball before completing the passing motion… We’d just won the game!

Just as I came over the edge and started to believe, the referee came out from his little video tent and clarified that the play should’ve been ruled an incompletion, it would remain West Virginia’s ball, the down and distance to be third and five. There wasn’t even a loss of yards, they didn’t call it a sack or intentional grounding or anything, third and five. We spent the entire ensuing timeout in a state of confused shouting about the ruling, having to come down from the high of what we thought was a game finished. Before I even had a chance to catastrophize, both teams were lined up for the third down play. I pointed to the top of the screen in disgust – They’d left one of our corners on an island one-on-one with Bryce Ford-Wheaton, the guy who’d been killing us all game. Before I’d even finished the sentence, Daniels turned and threw in Ford-Wheaton’s direction, as probably anyone in that stadium, anyone watching on TV, and anyone on the field could’ve expected… Including that corner left on that island, who jumped the route, intercepted the pass, and started streaking down the sideline.

I need a word stronger than hooting and hollering, but less negatively connotated than screaming and squealing, to describe what noises we vocalized in that moment, freely and loudly, while jumping up and down and hugging. I still momentarily checked the TV every few seconds for a chiron indicating a flag, but none came, and even as that corner – Cobee Bryant, the same player who’d returned the blocked field goal last week – crossed the goal line, the scorebug didn’t change to indicate either a touchdown or the end of the game, and the announcers went basically completely silent in the moment. I kept looking at the TV for any indication, waiting for the guillotine to come down and announce that, no, the game wasn’t over, it was all for naught once again, but that indication didn’t come either. 

Finally the broadcast cut to JT Daniels removing his helmet in frustration, then to Neal Brown walking around the field like he was lost, and at that point I allowed myself finally to let loose and accept that the game had gone final, and I let loose in sort of a primal sense, jumping and fist pumping and high fiving, screeching (maybe that’s the right word). They’d done it! I wanted to run outside and shout and celebrate, but it was really pouring down rain out there, so we settled for celebrating inside: me, Ben, and Ben’s cat Fiona, who could not have cared less, our fervor didn’t even faze her, she slept through much of it and woke up only to bathe herself for a half hour.²

This game may have changed something about this project. It certainly changed a something about this essay, as it’s about four times as long as I expected it to be, and I just don’t know what to expect out of the rest of the project as a whole right now regarding the tenor and mood it takes. I expected a loss here, a loss against Houston, then a win against Duke, and we’d be looking down the rest of the eight game season looking for progress and solace in a couple of wins. I expected a game like this to happen, but I expected it to come on the road in Lubbock or Norman later in the year, not in Week 2 in Morgantown! Now I don’t know what to expect. I was set to be satisfied with any sort of progress in the record, but I think 3-9 might be disappointing to me now. Could this turn into a blog about the miracle season, the one in which the Jayhawks turned it all around? Could my last post of the year come from a hotel room in Dallas after a win over Tulane in the SERVPRO First Responders Bowl? I doubt it, but it seems a lot less impossible than it did before Saturday. 

Permission to Dream. Permission to Dream.

1. I put this as a footnote so as to not break the flow of this crucial part of the essay, but these commentators were no help at all over the entire course of the game. I appreciate their efforts and I understand that commentating a football game is a difficult task, but that was an abysmal performance from the ESPN+ crew, so many factual errors, the color commentator was calling passes incomplete after the receiver had four or five steps down, the play-by-play commentator would let entire plays go by in silence, including the most pivotal play of the game… Makes you appreciate the work of some of the other commentators on ESPN’s roster. Camera work wasn’t great either, editing was okay but there were plays wherein the cameraman would get faked out by fairly obvious play action or misjudge the path of a ball in flight. I understand that it’s a difficult endeavor, but the production quality was so poor. Playing on ESPN+ each week is 100% a pseudo-punishment for years of ineptitude for this program. That might be another one of those small markers of the program’s progress that I mentioned last week: When we’re back on cable instead of behind the online paywall, that shows progression. For what it’s worth, next week’s game against Houston is on ESPNU. 

2. luxurious and unnecessary of a housecat such as herself