KU's football makeover will take more patience than money -- but the money still helps
LAWRENCE, Kan. -- The problem with Lawrence is not that it's a basketball town. It's that it tends to look at everything through the lenses of a basketball town, that the view becomes framed, even distorted, within a basketball context.
And this, really, is where Kansas Jayhawks football suffers the most. For one, every other school in the Big 12 treats the gridiron as its front porch. At KU, the front porch is Allen Fieldhouse, and football is something the big kids play out in the backyard until it gets dark.
Also, 25 straight league losses is not exactly the kind of thing you stick at the front of the brochure.
"It's truly a daily, weekly, monthly process," KU athletic director Sheahon Zenger told FOXSportsKansasCity.com.
"And it's almost like the book 'The Tipping Point': Once you've amassed enough momentum, it tops over. And you've got to have that breakthrough game, whatever that is, and then you go from there."
After a 13-10, last-second, storm-the-field win over Louisiana Tech back on September 21 at Memorial Stadium, the Jayhawks (2-5) have dropped four straight Big 12 tilts by an average score of 44-17. After the first no-way-can-this-stud-miss transfer quarterback (Dayne Crist) crashed and burned, the second (Jake Heaps) appears to be well on his way to doing the same. Memorial is becoming conspicuous for its empty seats again, and talk-radio callers are questioning the wisdom of coach Charlie Weis -- now 3-16 as the man at the top -- barely two years into his tenure.
And meanwhile, there's Zenger, hat in hand, trying to raise money to make KU's back porch -- Memorial -- look more like a front porch again, the kind of thing you can run on the cover of the pamphlet.
"People ask me that a lot," Zenger said. "The reality of it is we need this facility, regardless of the current season, or past seasons, or anything else. I think our key donors understand that."
Hopefully, they understand this, too: Football isn't basketball. And 19 games in is too quick to start lining up the villagers and handing them all torches, no matter how ugly -- and granted, this one has looked positively hideous as of late -- the monster may be.
KU hoops is one of the nation's collegiate jewels. It plays in an old building, but that's part of the charm. It recruits to history, then supplements it with even more, link after link of an unending chain of banners. That history, those traditions -- the rules of the game, Wilt, Danny & The Miracles, etc. -- are a part of the legend forever.
Also, in basketball, the right three players can flip you from a 13 seed to a 3 seed in the span of a few months.
In football, the right three players means you're still about 11-15 players away. It's a volume game, played at volume stakes.
College basketball is a Porsche 911, powerful and quick and slight; programs can flit and spin on a dime -- which is also part of what makes KU, and Self's era therein, so remarkable in its consistent excellence.
College football? College football is an oil tanker. Once it gets going in a direction, it tends to stay in that direction, stay on that path, even the destination is a one-way ticket to oblivion. It turns slowly. Painfully, painfully slowly. A few magicians -- Nick Saban and Urban Meyer spring immediately to mind -- can walk in and grease the wheel, so to speak, but the fewer peripherals (tradition, results, money, talent, facilities, coaching) you have on your side, the slower the turn.
"In college, it takes time," Zenger said. "Unfortunately for fans, it often takes longer than they would like."
The Kansas City Chiefs go from 2-14 and the No. 1 pick one year to 8-0 and in line for a No. 1 seed in the postseason the next. But the NFL is a different animal from the quasi-amateur feeder system, a institution designed for parity and competitive balance -- football socialism, if you like. And even within that context, what's going on at Arrowhead right now is turning into one of the most singularly remarkable one-season makeovers in the history of North American professional sports.
In the NFL, you can fire the general manager and the coach and the quarterback and half the roster and try building with bricks after the straw and wood crap out. At KU, there's no union, no salary cap. You can't invest in the future if you're still paying for the sins of the past (Turner Gill, Mark Mangino, et cetera). As ugly as the present is -- the Jayhawks visit Texas this weekend and Oklahoma State the weekend after that -- it's too early, and too expensive, to start sharpening the axes.
"Let the season play out," Weis said. "You know, I think that's the most important thing. Because sometimes I think that sometimes you have to look at not just how things are going, but how they finish. I've said all along, and I could be wrong -- I don't think I'm going to be wrong -- (but) like I've said all along that I think we'll be playing our best football at the end of the year.
"OK, so I mean, we have five games to go to find out if that's the case or not. It isn't exactly like we've been playing (Division) 1-AA teams every weekend for the last bunch of weeks, the last I checked. It's just dial 'em up, one after another. And the Big 12 is a very good league and very good competition and they're very good football teams. I mean, Baylor just stomped us. The last I checked, there were a bunch of other teams that didn't fare too well against them (either). That's not an excuse. That's reality. That's just the way it is."
Alas, you can't fulfill caviar dreams on a StarKist budget. In 2009, KU announced a $34-million luxury box expansion on the east side of the stadium; the project wound up getting shelved when the finances dried up.
This past spring, ground was broken on Rock Chalk Park, a $39-million project that will serve as the base for softball, soccer and track and field -- as well as the future home of the Kansas Relays. That would allow Zenger -- a former football assistant, an ex-lieutenant for Bill Snyder during the early years of his rebuild at Kansas State -- to get the track taken out of Memorial, the first big, aesthetic step in getting the least-regarded home football stadium in the Big 12 on par with its cousins.
And that's only the tip of the iceberg: Last month, KU began putting pencil to paper on renovation designs for a new-look Memorial. The mode along Mount Oread is invest now, win later.
Or rather, win eventually. Fingers crossed.
"That's something that we're already in the planning stages," Zenger said. "And (a timetable), that's not something I can answer right now. But, however, it is in the real planning stages. And whether it be with (architects at) HNTB or (investment firm) George K. Baum & Company reviewing our architectural plans and our financial health, we're nearing launch point of the true campaign."
Time, in the long run, will tell if Uncle Charlie is the right pair of hands at the right wheel. But know this: Changing captains every two or three years isn't going to get the tanker turned any faster.
You can follow Sean Keeler on Twitter @seankeeler or email him at seanmkeeler@gmail.com.
