It was so bad for Tulsa quarterback James Kilian on Saturday night that he couldn’t find protection even out of bounds.

“No safe place,” the senior said, while investigating the multiple scrapes on his upper arms that he suffered when KU players pushed him out of bounds and onto the track surrounding Memorial Stadium.

Those kind of hits not only stung Kilian physically, but were the main reason that the Jayhawks turned a sluggish 3-all first-half tie into a 21-3, season-opening victory over the Golden Hurricane.

A battered Kilian said the Jayhawks’ defensive effort in the second half was superb.

“They did a solid job of stopping us, obviously,” Kilian said of KU’s defense, which allowed Tulsa only 17 yards on 19 plays in the last 30 minutes — and only 141 yards on 59 plays (2.4 per play) for the night.

“I knew they had a good defense in what they try to do,” Kilian said. “We couldn’t get things going. We only had four or five plays then out, a lot of three-and-outs. When you have a defense like that, that can run as well as they do, you can’t wear them down. As long as they stay fresh, they’re a tough defense to go against.”

That’s a statement not many Jayhawk opponents would utter last season, when KU gave up nearly 413 yards a game.

“They outplayed us the entire game and were very opportunistic and took advantage of the mistakes that we made,” second-year Tulsa coach Steve Kragthorpe said.

That was especially true in the second half, when it seemed like KU hit Kilian on nearly every play.

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“They changed a little bit, brought some guys and overloaded a little bit,” Kilian said. “But when a defense does that, you have to try and attack that. If you can’t make plays, and if you can’t make them pay on the blitz, then they’re going to keep doing it, and that’s what happened tonight.”

The Jayhawks sacked Kilian six times, including a safety, and picked off the Davey O’Brien Award and Johnny Unitas Golden Arm Award candidate twice.

“Their defense really came out to play tonight,” said Tulsa senior center Derek Warehime, whose bobbled exchange with Kilian at the end of the first half led to KU kicking a field goal for the tie — and perhaps boosting the Jayhawk defense’s confidence heading into intermission.

“James (Kilian) thought that the snap was fine, and I also thought that it felt normal, but for some reason it didn’t work out, and that play really changed the momentum of the game,” Warehime said.

But Kilian said that Tulsa — a team that went 8-5 and to its first bowl game since 1991 in Kragthorpe’s first-year last season — could correct all its offensive mistakes in time for Saturday’s in-state battle against another Big 12 Conference foe — Oklahoma State.

“Win or lose, you go right on to the next one,” said Kilian, who moved into the top-10 on Tulsa’s all-time total offense list with 88 combined yards Saturday. “The good thing is that everything we did wrong we can correct. We’ll just have to look at the tape and go from there.”