K-State Football: Good, Bad, Ugly Vs Texas Longhorns

When you lose a heart-breaking game, lots of things look ugly. Here is what stands out to me.

Coaching

This is a blanket statement. I’ve never seen so many mistakes from this staff in a game before. The most troubling aspect is the different types of mistakes. In fact, I could have written about three different mistakes and just had that be my “ugly” section. I want to highlight a few different mistakes.

• Dalton Schoen being buried on the depth chart. This is a program management issue. How this guy wasn’t elevated earlier is beyond me. When you add in the struggles of the wide receivers, this guy needed to be in there to help out the quarterback. This is the type of mistake that’s made in the day to day running of the program
• The end of the second half. K-State, with the ball, in a tie game, almost managed to lose the game. Shockingly, this isn’t the only problem as there were multiple mistakes with this part of the game. First, they pulled Delton and put back in an injured Ertz. Then, according to the post game, they attempt to go for the win. Yet the play-calling certainly did line up with that. This is starting to feel like there is no leadership in the coaching staff. Some people want to do one thing, so they tried to do that, whereas others wanted something else. It almost cost them the game. It’s early to say this, but I think off-season changes are starting to be a must.

The decision not to go for two in overtime. There was a

statistical study

done that showed that people playing defense first win about 61% of the time. I don’t want to bore you with the details, but when you are the team that is lucky to be there, by extending overtime, you are flipping those odds to Texas. With the way Alex was running, all you needed was about 40% confidence to make the play a good decision. The game of football is getting smarter with statistics and K-State failed to do a risk analysis of the situation. It was a deciding factor in the outcome.