LAWRENCE, Kan. — A nod may be as good as a wink to a blind horse, but quarterbacks? Quarterbacks, not so much.
“Being with him in the locker room, in the weight room, you build like (a rapport),” Justin McCay, the new Kansas star wide receiver, said of Jake Heaps, the new Kansas starting quarterback.
“Like, ‘OK, when I look at you like THIS, I’m already excited about .... I’m going to tap you (if) I’m going to give you THIS.’ You get kind of this body chemistry.”
Body chemistry. Uh-huh.
“That sounds weird,” McCay continued, “But you know what I mean? You’ve got to go on the fly. You’ve got to go fast and on the fly when you’re making adjustments like that.”
And the hard and fast from Saturday is this: McCay and Heaps, the studs of the 2013 Jayhawk spring football game, are clearly on the same page. They hooked up eight times for 99 yards and a touchdown to power the Blue team (mostly starters) over the White team (mostly not), 34-7, on a sun-kissed afternoon at Memorial Stadium.
“You can’t underestimate chemistry,” Kansas football coach Charlie Weis allowed after his second spring exhibition. “You could see it even in the fade ball at the end … obviously, it’s not the first time they’ve done that. They’ve done that a bunch of times. I think one reason Jake had such a big day was because Justin had a big day. And vice versa. One of the big reasons Justin had a big day was because Jake knows where to throw and knows where he’s going to be. That’s a good sign.”
Darned straight, especially coming off a forgettable 1-11 season in which Weis’ imported signal-caller of choice, Dayne Crist, rarely seemed to be working from the same book as his receiving corps, let alone the same page. Among the litany of painful statistics to come out of Year 1 of The Weis Era, one still grates: Of KU’s paltry seven passing touchdowns over 12 contests, none — zip, zero, nada — were actually snared by a Jayhawk wideout.
McCay — a 6-foot-2 leaper with a granite build, full of pent-up rage from having to sit out last season as a transfer from Oklahoma — has the potential to change that dynamic immediately. In a good way.
“He’s got what I call, ‘pluckability,’” Weis allowed.
Wait. Pluck-a-what?
“I mean, I’m serious,” the coach continued. “That’s what Justin has. He’s got ‘pluckability.’ So instead of being a guy who’s 6-2, 6-3 who plays like he’s 5-11, when they go up after the ball, you know, now you’ve got a better chance.”
With the 6-2 McCay, who starred at Kansas City’s Bishop Miege High School, on one side, and 6-3 Josh Ford (two catches, 66 yards, 1 TD) on the other, Heaps already has the potential to enjoy a luxury that Crist went without: A target who’ll fight for a jump ball. And, more to the point, a target who can actually win most of those battles in the air.
“We’ve needed it,” offered Heaps, who completed 20-of-28 attempts, including 10 straight at one point, for 257 passing yards and four scores. “We’ve needed that in our offense.
“When you have Tony Pierson (as a slot-back/receiver) being as dynamic a football player as he is, and you have the (stable) of running backs that we have, really what we need is a dynamic football player to go down and stretch the defense and make plays downfield and really stretch a defense out.”
They need a guy who can do what McCay did in the third quarter: Cradle the left boundary on a ‘go’ route, get some separation from his defender, then have the wherewithal to jump over his man, reach up with one hand, and turn a rainbow from Heaps into a 47-yard completion.
“There (were) a couple times during the game where he’s, ‘Hey, hey.’ He pressed me, (saying), ‘Let me run a ‘go,’” Heaps recalled. “And you let him run a ‘go,’ and he catches a great one-handed catch like that.”
The trick now, of course, is carrying that mojo over into the tilts that actually count. That’s the trouble with spring games: Any football contest in which a starting quarterback is off-limits to full contact has to be taken with several dozen grains of salt.
Weis’ inaugural spring contest last year had at least twice the crowd of the one that turned up Saturday, despite the blue skies. In late April 2012, the giddy thousands walked away convinced that Crist, a transfer from Notre Dame, was the answer under the center, the next Russell Wilson, a notion had them whispering about a 5- or 6-win season as late as August.
So when it turned out that Crist couldn’t hit the broad side of a very broad barn once he faced live defenses, Jayhawk fans felt confused — and more than a little betrayed. Whereas last April was marked by unrealistic optimism, this one teetered between guarded optimism and healthy skepticism.
“It’s understandable,” Heaps noted. “There was a lot of excitement, there was a lot of buzz last year, and that’s what happens when you’re a new coach and there’s a new system, and all that. And obviously, we didn’t perform.
“But this is Year 2 in our program, and we feel like we’re a very completely different team … I think you’re going to see a completely different football team out there. And I think we’re going to surprise a lot of people. And you know, that’s fine. If people are guarded and skeptical, that’s great. You know, we’ve take an Us-Versus-The-World mentality, and that’s how we’re going to continue to be.”
To his credit, Heaps, a transfer from Brigham Young with 16 career FBS starts under his belt, posted significantly better numbers than Crist did a year ago (11-19, 156 yards). Still, in exhibitions such as these, where the end game is to make sure nobody gets hurt, stats are largely irrelevant. In April, numbers lie.
No, spring football is about the eyes. If it looks fishy when the flowers are blooming, there’s a good chance it’ll still be fishy once the leaves change colors in the fall.
But that’s not to say the highlights don’t have staying power: Heaps and McCay worked out a ton together as dual redshirts during the 2011-12 school year, and the synergy showed. Their exploits on the scout team became the stuff of legends, a legend that loomed larger and larger as the 2012 Jayhawks failed to win a Big 12 conference tilt.
On several occasions Saturday, the reality appeared to match the hype. And perhaps none moreso than during the Blue team’s last drive of the second quarter, on a back-shoulder route up the left boundary with about 1:40 left in the half. McCay cut on a dime with a defender draped over his right shoulder, then effectively boxed him out. Heaps responded with a frozen rope toward the sideline, a laser at the back of McCay’s left shoulder where only his wideout could bring the ball inbounds safely.
“We run that a lot,” McCay said later. Then he grinned. “I’m tired of running those, honestly.”
It was an NFL throw, capped by an NFL grab, culminating in the kind of first down NFL offenses find a way to convert, series after series. Whether it’s body chemistry or quantum physics, on Mount Oread — or, heck, anywhere else — it doesn’t get much more ‘pluckable’ than that.
You can follow Sean Keeler on Twitter @seankeeler or email him at seanmkeeler@gmail.com
