"It ain't over 'til it's over."
-Yogi Berra
"Do you believe in unlikelihood?"
- Cotton McKnight from the movie Dodgeball
Saturday's game was one of those that made me wish I was Joe Posnanski or someone else with impeccable writing ability. Instead, all I can do is offer up a personal anecdote:
My grandpa, grandpa and uncle were in Lawrence on Saturday. They were getting into town at roughly two o'clock and so they asked if they were going to have to wait until I got home from the game, to which I obviously made some derisive remark about how only a masochist would go watch that pillow fight. Sure enough, when I last checked the score it was 28-3 Colorado, I made a mental joke about how inept the team was, and went along my day.
Fast forward about 4 hours and we were eating at a semi fancy pants restaurant in Kansas City. Fortunately we were sitting semi close to a couple TVs and I managed to catch the score of our game. Seeing that caused me to stand up and crane closer to the TV, yelling "holy shoot (only I of course didnt' say shoot)." I then called my dad, my mom, and texted two of my friends to independently confirm that ESPN hadn't made some sort of mistake. And that is how the 2010 season has been. Granted that would have been an improbable comeback for any team to make, but for a team that had looked inept on both sides of the ball all season, it was so improbable that it was easier to believe a TV network and four people had made mistakes than it was to believe we had won a Big 12 game.
Let's see how we did keys to the game wise:
Give someone else that "Here we go Again" feeling
I would actually call this a big fail. Obviously being down 35-10 at half was something we were all too used to, and being up 35-10 at half was something Colorado was unfamiliar with. It would be fair to suggest that as Kansas was putting up points in bunches Colorado could have been getting the "here we go again" feeling, but then again when a team racks up the 2nd most points en route to a comeback in FBS history it is probably disingenuous to suggest that fans/players could see it coming.
Force it into the hands of Cody Hawkins
Well, to be fair, the need for Hawkins to throw it a ton wasn't until the last drive of the game. Still, we made him look like a Heisman candidate (kind of a broken record this year) as he went 29-44 for 322 yards and 3 TDs, though he did have 2 interceptions.
Deep middle anyone?
Well, I didn't get to see the game, so I will have to rely on eye witness accounts, but Tim Biere had a 21 yard catch which I am assuming came down the middle, Denver mentioned getting the ball to Patterson in space and he had 8 catches for 75 yards. He also mentioned getting McGriff some touches, and he got zero, so we can call that a minus.
Want to see me beating a dead horse? Win the battle for field position.
First of all, the .gif from that key was phenomenal. Secondly, let's evaluate how they did through the lens of FP% (which is number of plays ran in opposing territory)
Colorado: 51.3% (39 of 76 plays)
Kansas: 57.9% (40 out of 69 plays)
Yay we won the field position battle! And the game!