Bad off as Kansas football may seem now, believe me, it can be worse. It has been. Anyone who struggled through that 0-10 season of 1954 is mongoose-quick to agree.

At least this year’s Jayhawk entourage approached the Tulsa game with one victory. In winless ’54, the closest KU came to anybody was 18 points, a 36-18 drowning by SMU in a driving rain in the flooded Dallas Cotton Bowl, where the Mustangs once played home games.

Coach Chuck Mather’s ’54 Jayhawks opened with three straight home games. TCU won 27-6, and UCLA romped 32-7 before a paltry 22,000 spectators. Ah, but relief was reportedly on the way  not.

The young assistant Mather had sent to scout Colorado, foe No. 3, came back and assured the head man, his staff and the KU squad that CU was ripe for the picking. The aide was new, naive and badly equipped to evaluate a big league opponent; Colorado stampeded, 27-0.

By then, folks figured the situation might be serious. It sure-in-hell was. There followed seven more defeats, capped by a 41-18 season finale at Missouri. At least this 2002 squad can’t do worse than 1-11.

J.V. Sikes coached KU to a 7-3 record in 1952, including 13-0 and 26-0 shutouts of TCU and SMU, then two of the most glamorous teams in America. The losses were to Oklahoma (42-20), Nebraska (14-13) and Missouri (20-19) after All-America halfback Charlie Hoag wrecked a knee at Kansas State. With Charlie, KU could have been 9-1. By today’s standards, four of Sikes’s six teams would have gone to bowl games.

Things turned sour in 1953, KU fell to 2-8 and the folks who had never been Sikes fans moved him out. Sentiment was high to hire one-time Oklahoma star Jack Mitchell who was working wonders at Wichita U. (not State then).

Athletics director Dutch Lonborg had Jack in the bin but chancellor Franklin Murphy got this bug about some noble experiment: hiring a high school wunderkind and busting him onto the college scene, same as Notre Dame figured it would do with Chicago prep whiz Terry Brennan (and later Gerry Faust).

Mather’s 57-3 record at Washington High of Massillon, Ohio, got him the job at Kansas. Chuck, then 39, had won six state titles in Massillon and two mythical national championships. Murphyites didn’t see how he could fail to revive Kansas. Chuck’s record at four high schools was 111-18-5.

Further, Massillon’s storied program had also spawned Ohio State-Cleveland Brown immortal Paul Brown. Mather’s record was even better at Massillon than Brown’s. How could he miss?

Chuck’s high school, Hopedale, Ohio, had no football. He played basketball and baseball, then went to Ohio Northern, where he saw duty in only three varsity games at tackle. He was gangbusters at three Ohio preps before getting the Massillon job. He became noted as one of the nation’s foremost users of IBM machines to evaluate personnel and tactics, all graded through intensive scrutiny of film.

At gridiron-crazy Massillon, Chuck was allowed a coach for every position, unheard of in a day when Al Woolard was winning as many games at Lawrence High with only three or four aides.

But chancellor Murphy was hypnotized by the Miracle Man from Massillon. Chuck came here with great fanfare and four of his Ohio coaches  Lauri Wartainen, Paul Schofer, Dave Putts and Dick Piskoty. Holdover Wayne Replogle completed the staff. Rep and trainer Dean Nesmith were the only ones with even a hint of big-time experience.

Don Fambrough had been on the Sikes staff and got a courtesy interview by Mather. Never a chance. Don’s lucky he chose to follow Sikes to East Texas State rather than suffering the agony of total defeat with his beloved Jayhawks, many of whom he’d helped recruit.

Those ill-prepared Jayhawks lost 10 games but they were anything but losers. There were returning lettermen like John Anderson, Bud Bixler, Don Bracelin, Dick Blowey, Bobby Conn, Bob Forsyth, John Handley, Bob Hubbard, Dick Knowles, Bud Laughlin, Ralph Moody, John McFarland, Dick Sandifer, Rex Sullivan and Gene Vignatelli. Add Bill Bell, George Remsberg, Paul Smith, Gene Blasi, John Drake, Jim Hull, Bob Preston, Don Pfutzenreuter, Frank Black, Bev Buller, Al Jaso, Ted Rohde, Don Hess, Terry McIntosh, Dick Reich (Gil’s brother) Â there were still others of note.

This was when you could get up close and personal with kids rather than working in today’s computerized, impersonal, cookie-cutter, press conference climate. I never bled inwardly so much for any KU athletes quite as much as I did these guys.

Mather and his people were good-hearted and well-intentioned, but they flat-out didn’t have the background for the level of challenges KU faced. Brennan paralleled Chuck at Notre Dame and had two sensational debut years. But he tailed off and got fired same as Chuck. Mather’s mark here was 11-126-3. He later became a top-flight aide with the Chicago Bears and got rich in the insurance field.

Bad as it may seem here right now, it CAN be worse. KU’s spending plenty of money to get things respectable; the facilities are light years ahead of those of the past. KU bounced back from the painful Mather experiment; it can do so again after the Terry Allen drift.

Anytime you get to feeling hopeless, keep this in mind. Kansas State in the early 1980s was written up by Sports Illustrated as having absolutely the worst big-school football program in history. Then came 13 years of Bill Snyder.

It can be done, and with basketball staying great. KU has had some great football teams, though never consistently. Once KU can start scheduling Snyder-like cupcakes to get early seasoning, there could be some exciting times again.

But probably not this year.