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Before Saturday, the last time Kansas had won back-to-back games against Football Bowl Subdivision competition came on Sept. 26 and Oct. 10, 2009, with victories against Southern Mississippi and Iowa State.
That 2009 team was coached by Mark Mangino, who would be fired at the end of the regular season amid allegations of player mistreatment. Ten years and four head coaches later – five if you count interim coach Clint Bowen in 2014 – the Jayhawks have done it again. Hey, it took Kansas a little while to get its footing.
A decade later, let’s all say in unison: Break up the Jayhawks.
KU followed up on its road win against Central Michigan with a 55-14 whipping of Rutgers, in a matchup of Power Five bottom-feeders that should become sort of annual tradition – it’s the football equivalent of raising the bumpers on your bowling lane, handicapping the season so that at least one of these two teams has a good shot at getting into the win column in September.
Last week’s victory was the program’s first on the road since Sept. 12, 2009, ending an NCAA-record string of 46 consecutive road losses. Meanwhile, Saturday’s win was the Jayhawks’ first non-conference win against a Power Five foe since Sept. 19, 2009.
It’s funny to consider: That 2009 team was a wild disappointment for Kansas, which lost seven in a row after a 5-0 start and quickly saw Mangino’s rebuilding project unravel amid a series of boneheaded coaching changes. (Don’t forget that this is the program that hired Charlie Weis.) Only in hindsight, after a decade of misery, would a 5-7 finish seem like a light at the end of the tunnel.
Let’s enjoy this for Kansas but not get ahead of ourselves. This is still a team that opened its season with a loss to Nicholls State of the Football Championship Subdivision. The schedule has yet to reach Big 12 play, which begins next Saturday with a road trip to Baylor. The Jayhawks haven’t won a road game in league play since topping Iowa State on Oct. 4, 2008. Twice under Weis the Jayhawks opened at 2-1, in 2013 and 2014, and both times added just one win the rest of the way.
Fourth-year head coach David Beaty is still a longshot to return in 2019 due to his own track record thus far and the university’s change at athletics director. New hire Jeff Long, formerly of Arkansas, is almost certainly going to test the market and look for a new voice to lead Kansas football come December.
Unless KU starts rolling off wins, that is. Could it happen? It could, since the Jayhawks have a football team, pads, helmets and are scheduled to play nine more games through the end of the season. Will it happen? Probably not. But records are falling. Equally crazy things have happened – such as Kansas doing things it hadn’t achieved this decade.
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