Four from the weekend: Chiefs, Mizzou, K-State and even KU
The Kansas City Star
The template is “three things from the weekend,” but we need to extend it a bit today. All three local colleges and the Chiefs had what sure could be season-shaping (or, in Mizzou’s case, historical) games.
And before we get to that, I mentioned this on Twitter the other day, but a local MMA fighter named Eric Grant helped me move over the weekend. I suppose I was an exceptional client because he gave me some tickets to a big card at Cricket (Sandstone) Ampitheater on Sept. 22. I’ll be covering Collin Klein and his three levels of badass in Norman that night, but Eric said it’s cool^ if I give the tickets away.
^ He’s an MMA fighter, so, yes, I made double sure.*
Anyway, e-mail me at smellinger@kcstar.com if you’re interested and let’s get on with this.
- The Chiefs have much bigger problems than missing players, as the good-looking local columnist wrote, and they don’t have enough to make up for major mistakes from Matt Cassel, as the ugly one wrote.
Either way, they travel to my own personal Graceland this weekend to play another of Sunday’s worst teams — but one that embarrassed the Chiefs in last year’s season opener at home.
What we saw against the Falcons is a Chiefs team working without a safety net, one that needs most everything to go its way and one that’s incapable of making up for bad breaks or big deficits. That’s a heck of a way to go through the NFL season.
- Much of the talk about Missouri losing its SEC virginity over the weekend is justifiably about bigger things than just one football game. This is just the beginning, not the end, like I wrote in the column and I’m sticking with what I’ve thought all along about the Tigers: 8-4. It’s hard to imagine them winning at South Carolina or against Alabama at home, but everything else is on the table.
MU got worn down in the second half, especially after Gary Pinkel’s stupid fake punt, and it didn’t help that Georgia suited up some superhuman robot named Jarvis Jones who made approximately every play.
But here are two things I’ll remember in MU’s favor: the offensive line held up relatively well considering it finished with two starters playing the position they practiced last week (and none playing the position they expected to play in the preseason), and the defense was very fast and physical to the ball.
Also, I feel like the only person in the world who liked the uniforms.
- Really, K-State is dreaming reasonable dreams about a BCS bowl. There is every chance that this is overreaction, of course, just one game that K-State played well and Miami played awful and who knows how good either team really is? But this is still a team that won 10 games last year and returns most everyone and just went from 21st to 15th in the polls and is still probably underrated.
You can nitpick the Cats if you want, and point out they were outgained in Big 12 play last year and won so many of those games by margins that should be unrepeatable, but this is also true: Bill Snyder is a beast, and he has an impossibly tough quarterback who’s earned his total trust.
That’s a pretty tantalizing combination.
- Kansas football still sucks.
Nobody’s expecting miracles in Lawrence, but beating Rice — which hung with UCLA last week, but still lost that game by 25, still went 4-8 last year out of Conference USA and, let’s be honest, is still Rice — is not a miracle.
So much of what Charlie Weis has talked about has been about building excitement and making football something people want to see at Kansas, and it’s cool when he can flash those Super Bowl rings and talk about Tom Brady but it all falls pretty flat when you lose at home to a program that hadn’t beaten a BCS opponent on the road in at least 10 years (I got tired of looking).
Kansas football fans, like Royals baseball fans, have come by their skepticism honestly. Weis lost the benefit of the doubt, and he’ll have to earn it back in a schedule that might not give him another game in which KU will be favored.
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