Wanted: an adult in the room at Kansas.
That seemed to be the first order of business after a hype video tied college football trash talk to the painful history of slavery and the Civil War. It should have disappeared before anyone outside the program ever saw it, but it went up, caught fire, and became part of the conversation after Missouri beat Kansas 38-21 on Friday.
Nobody needs a lecture on the history of the Jayhawkers and Tigers. Using that history as rivalry bait was disrespectful and embarrassing.
Kansas fans noticed, too. Message Board Monday turned up plenty of anonymous criticism from Jayhawks who were willing to say their school crossed a line.
Ridjosh called Eli Drinkwitz “such a tool,” accusing him of trying to act tough and play the victim card while the hype video supposedly only helped Missouri. WestSideJayhawk went the other way, saying the clip didn’t get under anyone’s skin so much as make Kansas look amateurish and hand Missouri’s coach another chance to pile on.
GRockChalk pushed back, arguing that the video brought national attention back to a rivalry that had faded from view and that if the issue was the team losing worse, that was a separate problem. WardHawk sided with Missouri’s complaint, saying it was “pretty stupid” to villainize them over Civil War references and that it was only a sports rivalry.
Hawkinmichigan then made the whole thing a little lighter with, “Except for people from Missouri. They suck.”
Drinkwitz, for his part, had plenty to say after the game, and some of it landed squarely on target. “I was disappointed in the rivalry, the turn that it took today.
I thought that was uncalled for, and this is about two teams playing football. … Everybody’s got complicated pasts, and to make that an icon was bizarre to me.”
He kept going: “It’s a football game. It’s an American football game.
People love to come watch and cheer for their teams. It’s not even deeper than that.
And I get there’s a past for it, but why are we stirring that bull crap up? It’s 9/11.
This country needs unity now more than ever. And I was embarrassed for them, to be honest.”
That would have been enough. Instead, he added, “That’s why I tried to embarrass them at the end.”
And then: “If they want to have a football game and play the football game, a great rivalry on the border, then awesome, let’s do it. But if they want to make it deeper than that, we left Kansas bleeding again and call it good.”
So close. Then he wandered right back out of bounds. More adults, please.
Elsewhere, Oregon fans are spiraling after the Ducks’ 39-31 loss at Oklahoma State, the most stunning result of Week 2 and maybe the most stunning two-week snapshot of a team that was supposed to be great. Stewart Mandel pointed out that losing both coordinators looks like a real problem for Dan Lanning, and the message boards are already turning sharp.
BrentLakeO drew a line to Mark Helfrich’s 2016 collapse at Nebraska, saying he knew Helfrich was done when the coach doubled down on bad 2-point decisions and suggesting Lanning sounds the same way when defending his fourth-down calls. BlackandYellow pushed back on the strategy talk, arguing that going for it on fourth down can work, but only if the play-calling and execution are there to support it.
BrentLakeO wasn’t buying it, asking whether going for it on fourth-and-7 from his own 30 while down five on the road in the middle of the fourth quarter was really the right call. Craig S flatly declared, “This game informed me that Dan Lanning is done.
Clear as day.”
The one bit of comfort? Stormin put it bluntly: “We won’t be losing our coordinators after this year.”
At Texas, the day started ugly for Steve Sarkisian and Arch Manning and ended with a result that changes the whole mood. The Longhorns beat No.
1 Ohio State, and that’s the kind of win fans can tuck away and build around. It gives Manning a comeback moment and gives Sarkisian something far more useful than noise: a huge win that cuts into the storylines around his program.
Still, Sarkisian managed to create a different kind of attention afterward with a halftime non-interview and a strange exchange with Holly Rowe. It wasn’t the first time he’s been caught on camera acting petulantly, and plenty was made of his refusal to answer a couple of questions that coaches know come with the job.
Texas fans, though, mostly care about one thing: the win. That result leaves little room for anything else. Even so, the message-board crowd isn’t exactly ready to let go of the side-eye when it comes to Sark.
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