Mayer: Kansas deserves MU win

It won’t surprise anyone to learn that the football players and coaches at unbeaten USC, Texas and Virginia Tech work long and hard to be good. They’re not a bit different from the people at Kansas University, who are just as committed, devoted and desirous of success.

There’s an excruciatingly fine line between victory and defeat, particularly when you haven’t had a winning season since 1995. How about some flat-out luck?

Texas and USC plan to play for a national title; the Jayhawk family is desperate to beat Missouri, realizing that despite all their blood, sweat and tears, they risk winding up 3-8. People in floundering programs such as KU’s may even toil more than the big winners, who are so good they can afford shortcuts. When you’re a wannabe like KU, you tote an added mental as well as a physical burden.

You have to admire the dickens out of guys who stick with it in the face of relentless adversity. You

s-o-o-o-o want them to be rewarded. Coaches, administrators and such have nifty salaries and benefits to salve the wounds of defeat and the slings and arrows of criticism. The players bust their butts at the minimum-wage status of a scholarship; even if they win they get no raises. I so desperately want to see them excel. They deserve better than they’ve received.

What a lift an upset of Missouri would be for the Jayhawks, especially with that date coming up against a Nebraska team Kansas hasn’t beaten since 1968. As anyone the least bit familiar with the KU-Missouri series knows, “on any given day … ” The Tigers with their high-powered quarterback and three-game win streak are not out of reach. Trouble is, they’ve been working just as hard as Kansas to get better, and have done so. They have momentum, KU has none.

As for deep labor without success, there’ll be a group of guys here next weekend who in 1954 suffered the ultimate in frustration, the only 0-10 record in school history. Never empathized with any Jayhawks as I did for them and the coaching staff headed by Chuck Mather. Chuck, now 91, will be back for Nebraska weekend events organized by ex-quarterback Duane Morris.

Mather is like a number of KU coaches. He would not have left a high school dynasty at Massillon, Ohio, if he’d realized how much KU had to regroup. Guys like Mike Gottfried, Glen Mason and Mark Mangino know the pain of a void they didn’t anticipate. Mather’s teams went 0-10, 3-6-1, 3-6-1 and 5-4-1; he got plenty of misery. Yet Chuck says the most painful blow in his time at KU was the day he sent halfbacks John Traylor and John Francisco onto the field and he saw some “loyal” fans stalk out of Memorial Stadium.

Those two (’55-’57) and Homer Floyd (’56-’58) integrated KU football the way Lavannes Squires and Maurice King did basketball. Some of those same people had abandoned Hoch Auditorium when Phog Allen unveiled Squires and King, and such myopia was not one of the bright chapters in KU history.

But in line with the Nebraska game, let’s cite some positive notes, to conclude with a smile. KU went 5-0 against the Cornhuskers from 1957 to 1961, and Morris (’57-’59-’60 – red-shirted in ’58) and John Hadl (’59-’61) are the only signal-callers in KU annals to leave with 3-0 marks against NU.

But the biggest grins would glisten if the 2005 Jayhawks could make their intensive labor pay off against Missouri. You know they have worked as hard as anyone to do it. Love ’em for that.