Unprompted by anything other than a what's-the-team's-mindset type of question, Kansas tight end Jared Casey summed up the status of the KU offense in succinct fashion on Wednesday.
“We’re just kind of angry,” Casey said.
Angry that the Jayhawks 1-3. Angry that they’re not quite clicking. Angry that they keep turning the ball over. Angry that they can’t finish games. And angry that people on the outside are starting to think these are the new Jayhawks.
So, what’s the fix?
“It just goes back to practice and our habits,” Casey told R1S1 Sports on Wednesday. “Really, we’ve been pretty decent throughout the whole game, it’s just the finishing aspect of it.”
In each of the three losses to Illinois (23-17), UNLV (23-20) and West Virginia (32-28), Kansas held a lead in the fourth quarter only to watch it disappear in the final minutes.
“We’ve lost 3 straight & we didn’t think we’d be in this position, but we are now. That’s the reality of it. So, all we can do is come back to work.” — Senior TE Jared Casey
Finishing strong and eliminating the mistakes that have cost them late in games remains a focal point for both the KU offense and defense. And while they're both able and willing to keep working to try to dig their way out of the funk, Casey admitted that the repetitive nature of how they’ve lost the last three games has weighed on him and his teammates.
“These last few games it, it kind of feels like it’s the same thing over and over again,” Casey said Wednesday. “If we were to finish, we’d be 4-0, but that’s not the case right now and we know that. So, we really, really need to finish games and get wins like we should be.”
Asked specifically about using the word “angry” in his synopsis of where the program was at, Casey said the Jayhawks are trying their best to keep their emotions out of it and remain focused on doing the work to fix it.
“It’s hard,” he said. “We’ve lost three straight and we didn’t think we’d be in this position, but we are now. And that’s the reality of it. So, all we can do is come back to work.”
For the veterans on this team, that’s nothing new. Since Lance Leipold’s arrival in 2021, the Jayhawks have excelled in moving on from one week to the next, not letting what went well or what went wrong the week before impact their planning and preparation for the week ahead.
Their ability to do that, and do it well, was part of the reason the Jayhawks turned things around so quickly and played in back-to-back bowl games in 2022 and 2023.
Now, with plenty of season still ahead of them and their bowl hopes still high, they’re taking a page from their past to keep moving forward.
“We just say go back to the small things that we did when we first got this thing going,” Casey explained Wednesday. “That’s what we’re trying to do and that’s what we’re falling back on.”
He continued: “Once we watch (the previous week’s game) film and get out to practice, it’s kind of like that game didn’t even happen. Obviously, we know it did, but you have to flip the page. You can’t let one loss turn into two and you can’t let two turn into three or, in our case, we can’t let three turn into four. So, we’ve just got to keep going.”
While the Jayhawks (1-3 overall, 0-1 Big 12) would love to be able to get three wins in a single week, they know that’s not possible. So, their plan for ending their current losing streak and climbing out of the early-season slump is as cliché as it comes — one game, week, step and snap at a time.
“We know that the Big 12’s gonna be wide open,” Casey acknowledged on Wednesday. “But we’re not even looking at that right now. We’re just focusing on TCU.”
Kickoff for Saturday’s game against TCU (2-2, 0-1) at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri, is slated for 2:30 p.m. on ESPN+.
— For tickets to all KU athletic events, visit kuathletics.com
