Week 5: Iowa State
Regarding the winning of clunkers
I have no idea how to start this one, so I’m gonna go back to the ol’ well of couching things in history and listing broken streaks: The Jayhawks are 5-0 for the first time since 2009. The Jayhawks are in the Top 25 of both the AP and Coaches polls. The Jayhawks have beaten Iowa State for the first time since 2014. The Jayhawks held a Big XII team to one touchdown over a full game for the first time since 2020. The Jayhawks held a Big XII team to 11 points or fewer for the first time since 2007. The Jayhawks have won two straight games in-conference for the first time since 2008. The Kansas Jayhawks beat the Iowa State Cyclones in football for the first time since 2014.
I’ve had these moments this year in which I find myself in a moment or a place that I know I’ve been in before. Last week, I was at a sellout for the first time in twelve years. This week, I watched the Jayhawks defeat Iowa State. This is the only instance remaining this season in which I will have been in attendance for the front and back end of a conference losing streak – I was not in attendance for TCU in 2018, and our last wins over Texas (2021) and Oklahoma State (2007) came on the road – so please forgive me for taking some time to do this little exercise. I remember Iowa State in 2014 very well. It was November 8th, 2014. I was nineteen years old, I played the trombone in the Marching Jayhawks, it was comfortably cool outside but got cold once the sun went down around 5:30PM, so we broke out the winter stands hats for the game, I think we did a Maynard Ferguson show for that game.
I remember that day in more detail than one might expect a person to remember the third win of a three-win season in early November in a game between two teams with losing records fighting for ninth place in a conference of ten teams. It was one of the best days that I can remember from my experience as a student attending football games at KU. It was one of the only times in which our team fully dominated the other. In particular I felt good that day for our seniors, guys like Ben Heeney, Jacorey Shepherd, Dexter McDonald, Jimmay Mundine, Tony Pierson, Keon Stowers, I remember those guys trying so hard (and being quite good) but under Charlie Weis’ system and with the fruits of Charlie Weis’ labors in recruiting they didn’t have the team success or get the recognition in the media that I felt they deserved.
I developed a parallel sort of empathy with the team when I was a student. I took on something of a role among my friends as an ambassador or a pied piper or something of the sort with the team. I’d insist that we had some good players, they tried hard, and if they showed up they could say in the future that they were there when the program really turned around! I don’t remember if I thought that game was a turning point. It almost could’ve been, if KU had finished off a near upset in the next game against TCU, who would finish ranked third in the country as Big XII co-champions and Peach Bowl champions. If that game on November 15th, 2014, had turned out differently, Clint Bowen probably would’ve become the full-time head coach instead of David Beaty. I don’t know that things would’ve gone differently in terms of results (maybe the administration is less lenient with a former interim coach and he gets fired with a similar record in 2017?), but that could’ve been the turning point.
I remember this so closely for a few reasons - At the time I desperately wanted for there to be a turning point, so any instance in which a game came along even slightly resembling a feasible turning point had me rapt in attention. It also was subject to repetition — That Iowa State game was the Jayhawks’ last win before they went on to lose every game in the 2015 season. There was a 665 day stretch between November 9th, 2014 and September 3rd, 2016, in which that game was the last game that the Jayhawks had won. I did a lot of yearning for that day during that nearly two year period between ages 19 and 21. That is probably the primary reason that I can remember that game and that day in such specific detail: scarcity. I saw nine wins in five years. I had high school friends who had seen that many wins before even hitting the end of their Freshman years at other schools. Bad as each year was, I appreciated each win so much.
I bring this up to question what exactly I’ll remember about this game on the other end of the Iowa State losing streak. I definitely didn’t find myself appreciating it in the moment – it was a miserable performance of American football, to be fair, a defensive struggle swung primarily on missed field goals and a dropped punt by Iowa State – but if I think ahead eight years, in 2030, will I be able to tell you what the air felt like, and what clothing I wore, and for which players I felt happy? Perhaps that’s why I’m documenting this season this way. It’s all moving so fast. I just paused for a moment and took a look at the title of the Google Doc in which I’m writing this post (FBH G5: Iowa State) in mild disbelief that we’re already five games down – not to mention that each of them have been wins.
This is something that I lost last year during the Canadian Exile1 and even in the years I spent outside of Lawrence from 2018-20 I missed it. I love the feeling of living in Lawrence during football season. I’m reminded of my college years, absolutely losing myself for each game and joining so many others for this months-long ride2. It hits me, as I type this paragraph, that this is how I like to live. I am living moment-to-moment, and I am taking full stock of and appreciating each one of them within a larger context, and I am taking time each week to catalog them through these essays. Understanding this, I must put down my appraisal of the weekend’s game fully, mountains and pavement, screaming and silence3 accounted for in detail.
Broadly, I enjoyed myself on Saturday, but during its tenser moments I must admit that I found myself questioning whether I actually enjoy football or not. This was not some abomination of a football game by any means, it could have been worse. It could have been the Iowa/South Dakota State game from earlier this season which ended as a 7-3 Iowa victory, the Hawkeyes scoring The Gentleman’s Touchdown of two safeties and a field goal4. This was no offensive explosion as the Duke game was. This was a defensive struggle built on the back of poor special teams play. Kansas missed a field goal and somehow gave up a two-point conversion off of a dropped snap on an extra point try, Iowa State had a punt dropped and (crucially!) missed three field goals. To steal the terminology of Dan Rubenstein and Ty Hildenbrandt on The Solid Verbal podcast, that game was a clunker, and to steal their logicizing as well, good teams win their clunkers, so I suppose that I come away from it feeling that the Jayhawks are a good team.
But my goodness, as a partisan, that was a harrowing experience, and I have very few cogent takeaways. My one honest attempt at an appraisal of the team from last week5 was completely disregarded this week, as the defense kept KU in the game while the offense sputtered in the second half, and I will make no more attempts at anything more than surface level analysis on what I expect from this team. They can and will do whatever they do, and I will watch it happen. There were no offensive fireworks to wow me today, which is fine, as one must endure defensive struggle in order to appreciate an offensive fireworks show.
The true harrows came from the experience of being there to see it unfold. There was no triumph to behold in the second half, after the Jayhawks scored two touchdowns in the second quarter, they had to hold on by the fingertips for the rest of the contest, which is a positively miserable experience to experience around fellow fans. The particular fellow fans that surrounded me on Saturday certainly seemed miserable. I don’t know what it is about the section in which my tickets are located, but the people around me seem to be up to their necks in absolute bitterness even when things are going well, constantly furious about the refs and the coaches’ strategies. I danced around this last week, blaming their furor partially on the sun’s oppressive presence, but we were firmly in the shade of the press box this week and they maintained about the same state of constant irritation, even moreso in the fourth quarter as the game seemed to be slipping away6.
The horse from which I sit and level these descriptions is not so high, I should clarify: What I lack in impotent foot stomping and screaming I make up for by forgetting to breathe during tense moments7 I spent about the entirety of the last Iowa State drive tapping my foot on the ground rhythmically: eight counts in, eight counts hold, eight counts out. I imagine that, to an outsider to whom this team didn’t mean quite so much, without an interest in football, it really must seem as if I and the people around me went to the stadium for torment rather than fun on Saturday. This was not the game that I would stand on a cliffside and proselytize about if I wanted to serve as an ambassador for the sport.
So, of course, I found myself serving that role on Saturday. Over the course of the spring and summer of this year, I fell very hard for an absolutely wonderful person, who had not attended a college football game before this one, though she took interest in the cultural experience of being at one. The good fortune of aligned work schedules and extra tickets fell upon us this weekend, so I chose to use this game to introduce her to the phenomenon of Kansas Football. Her keen eyes, due to her work and training in massage therapy, provided probably the best perspective on how the game affected my emotional and physical wellbeing. Over the course of the fourth quarter, she tapped at my arm a few times and identified how concerningly compact my posture had become, my neck and spine so tense and arched so far forward that in profile I probably resembled a lowercase letter ‘r’ more than I did a healthy person down the stretch yesterday. We had a great time, but I feel badly about putting her through the experience of watching me kvetch to my physical detriment.
When I think back on this game in eight years, I’ll likely remember it as the game in which Iowa State’s kicker missed three field goals. The kicker’s name is Jace Gilbert, who will likely become anonymous in my memory the same way that the Iowa State kicker who missed the crucial late kick in 2005 has8. I’ll never forget the psychological torment that the guy seemed to endure on Saturday, though. He lined up to placekick five times on Saturday, and only once did he see a ball go through the uprights. His first attempted field goal in the first quarter, from 38 yards out, hit the right upright. His lone attempted extra point was subject to a fumbled snap that the holder picked up and was able to run in to convert an accidental two-point conversion. His second field goal attempt, at the beginning of the third quarter, from 35 yards out, was good. His third field goal attempt, which would’ve tied the game in the middle of the fourth quarter, again hit the right upright.
I have been going to football games for probably 24 years now, and I can’t remember cognitively ever seeing a ball in play hit the upright. That seems like a much more difficult task than getting it between the two uprights is. I did the math9 and it’s about 37 times more difficult to hit the upright than it is to the distance between the two. This guy did it twice! To make matters worse, he is a true freshman, and the visitors sideline is right in front of the KU student section, only separated by a few feet. I saw our students point and ridicule him as he walked off the field after missing his third attempt, I have to imagine the mockery got into his head somewhat.
Iowa State had the ball and was driving with the chance to win with three minutes left in the game. It took them eight plays with one fourth down conversion, but they made their way into KU territory. What will be a forgotten but crucial, game-deciding play was O.J. Burroughs’ third down tackle of Iowa State receiver Xavier Hutchinson, who caught a pass at the twenty yard line and needed only to make up one yard for a first down, but was brought down by the legs before he could make any progress. It looked like they might go for it on 4th and 1 (and they’d had great success on fourth and short throughout the game), but Matt Campbell elected to put the game on the shoulders of the Freshman.
I can only sort of tell from my vantage point at midfield if a kick makes it through or not, unless we have a ball-hit-upright situation as we’d had twice before. This one was fairly clear even from my distance and angle, as he missed badly. Post-analysis reveals that his first two misses were actually heading wide right and hooked left into the right upright. I think this led him to aim left in attempt to correct, but he overdid it. The kick was wide left off of his foot and it hooked left anyway. It landed about ten yards behind the letter ‘K’ of the word “KANSAS” in the endzone.
With a few days of separation I can say that I feel sympathetic for the kid. I hear stories of what the West Virginia students did to Pat McAfee after he missed significant kicks and I hope Iowa State treats him well, that must be an absolutely miserable experience. However, in the moment, I didn’t care, all that mattered was that we’d won. While the tension of a nervy final few minutes defined by offensive impotence resting on a defense which to that point had seemed shaky had me bent in half and suffocating, the total release of tension that came out of me as the referees signaled the kick was no good was an incredible, freeing feeling, like how I imagine it feels to hit zero gravity on one of those space planes that Jeff Bezos takes. I found that I had no energy left to even consider hemming and hawing about the students rushing the field. I hope they go for the goalposts one of these days, but the security people seem to prioritize keeping them off the posts above all else, which is probably necessary from a safety, liability, and economic standpoint, but I’d like to see another one taken down in my lifetime.
I have struggled to put my opinions about last Saturday into words. We are slipping back into regularity. This is what fans of normal football programs deal with. Sometimes your team backs its way into a win rather than stealing it from the grips of fate as an underdog. I never, as a student, for any of those nine wins, felt ambivalent after a game was won, or disappointed despite the result, as I would’ve clung tightly to any win regardless of its accompanying caveats, and I don’t want to let myself be that way with this one. This was a great time, and I can appreciate an ugly win like that. The Jayhawks are 5-0 for the first time since I was fourteen years old. They have a number next to their name in the AP Poll and ESPN’s College Gameday will be coming to Lawrence on Saturday.
I’ve been less than optimistic about the next game at the end of each of these posts basically dating back to the first one, so I figure that I should quit trying to predict anything. I know not whether the Jayhawks will win or lose against TCU next weekend, but I will be there, and I’m going to appreciate it all.
I spent August to December of 2021 living in Waterloo, Ontario in an aborted attempt at pursuing a PhD
I was asked by a patron during my time bartending in the winter of 2020 if I missed anything about college, and I told them that what I missed the most was the feeling that something was always going on at KU, and in Lawrence, and when I was in the band it was something we all worked towards, which contrasted the stagnancy in which I and most others were inundated at the time.
That would’ve been among the funniest games in history to attend as a neutral viewer, outside of the classic VT00WF game of 2014.
“The offense can keep KU in any game they play this year, and the defense can keep the opponent in any game they play this year.”
I know I’m harping on this, but the rage these people directed at the coaches who’ve turned this program around and brought us to our best season in over a decade over their conservative (and admittedly impotent) playcalling near the end was astounding to me.
I discovered that I do this in quick succession, first during the 2012 US Open Cup final between Sporting KC and Seattle and then later in the KU/Texas game that same year. During the latter of the two I had to get out of my seat and go into the men’s bathroom and dry heave.
I had to look it up, it was Bret Culbertson.
The distance between two goalposts in NCAA football is 18.5 feet, or 222 inches, and the average upright is about six inches in diameter though apparently it can vary, ergo there is on average 37 times as much space between the uprights as there is on the physical upright
BONUS PHOTO:
Security’s daisy chain of goalpost protection, which proved effective in the end despite how silly it appears