Not since 1988 when the worst Kansas University football team I’ve seen in the last 34 years lost its first eight games have I seen the Jayhawks at a lower ebb.

This year’s edition, under first-year coach Mark Mangino, is coming off a fall-from-ahead loss to a Baylor team that hadn’t won a Big 12 Conference game in this century, or even the final year of the last one.

Baylor has been so bad that the sports anchor of a Dallas TV station ranked Kansas No. 8 on its list of Top 10 area high school football teams. Nobody, the Big D throat said, loses to Baylor.

Hopefully, that gut-wrenching 35-32 defeat in Waco, Texas, was the nadir, the rock bottom. The Jayhawks still have a half-dozen games remaining, but they’ll be heavy underdogs in all six.

Sure, Kansas could win one or two David did whip Goliath but the unofficial start of men’s basketball season is Friday night, and you know what that means. Football will be usurped by Roy’s boys.

The only question left to ask about Kansas football is this: How long will it take to rebuild?

No one knows, but if historical precedent is any indication, it will take first-year coach Mark Mangino a minimum of two years, but realistically three or four.

Pepper Rodgers came to Mount Oread after Jack Mitchell’s last team went 2-7-1 in 1966. In Rodgers’ first year, the Jayhawks went 5-5, and a year later were playing in the Orange Bowl.

Rodgers was fortunate, though. He inherited one of the most talented recruiting classes in school history. He had a senior class in 1968 Bobby Douglass, John Zook, et al. that was so good that when they used up their eligibility the Jayhawks cascaded to 1-9 the next season.

Don Fambrough didn’t have the same good fortune as Rodgers in inheriting super classes. However, in each of his two stints as KU head coach (1971-74 and 1979-82), Fambrough needed just three years to go from nowhere to a bowl game.

It’s worth noting Fam did it the second time after inheriting a 1-10 team, making that feat all the more remarkable because the next coach to pick up the pieces of a 1-10 team needed five years to reach a bowl game.

Parenthetically, before continuing with Glen Mason’s tenure, let me say that Fambrough, aka Mr. Kansas Football, will turn 80 a week from Saturday the same day the Jayhawks will play Texas A&M at Memorial Stadium. If you see Fam that day, wish him a happy birthday.

On to Mason. As I mentioned earlier, he found the cupboard virtually bare when he came here in 1988 after Bob Valesente was fired. Mason’s first team was so dreadful it lost to New Mexico State in Memorial Stadium. How bad was that? It was the only game the Aggies won that season.

Mason’s ’88 team was consistently bad, too, surrendering 63 points each to Nebraska, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State. Close were Auburn and Missouri, but UA and MU settled for 56 and 55 points.

Finally, in 1991 Mason turned the corner with a 6-5 record. In 1992 the Jayhawks were ranked in the Top 25 after defeating Brigham Young in the Aloha Bowl.

Mason’s rebuilding program was textbook. He installed his system and slowly but surely brought in Big Eight-caliber players, a handful whom are still playing in the National Football League. Mason did more or less the same thing at Minnesota. Today he is president of the American Football Coaches Assn. and one of the highest-paid college coaches in the country.

Rodgers, Fambrough and Mason all rebuilt KU football. They did it in different ways and at varying speeds. Most important, they proved the Jayhawk can indeed be a Phoenix, that it can be a bird that rises from its own ashes.

In the meantime, how long Kansas football remains a pile of ashes this time is anybody’s guess.