With every injury to a defense thin on depth, the Kansas University football outlook grows a little hazier. Linebacker James Holt and safety Darrell Stuckey are sidelined. That hurts. Yet, the KU program remains on solid footing.

And then there is the Big 12 school just to the west.

Kansas State first-year coach Ron Prince has whipped up a ton of interest from an already rabid fan base. His summer events drew record participation numbers. He talks and talks and talks and talks and talks up the Wildcats. And then he talks some more.

And then he does some really strange things, such as out 14 players who did not pass his conditioning test. Named them for all the world to see. Embarrassed them. Why do that? To motivate them? That’s the job of the coaching staff. In doing what he did, Prince as much as acknowledged his staff did not get the players to respond during summer conditioning. After naming them, Prince then placed them on a physically-unable-to-perform list and prohibited some of them from practicing.

By going public with the names, including several starting offensive linemen and a pair of defensive starters, Prince might as well have told the K-State fan base: “I have failed to motivate these players. Now it’s your turn. If you see them out at the bars, inhaling cheeseburgers, scold them. Tell them to mix in a salad.”

I’m confused. Aren’t the players accountable to the coaching staff, not to the fan base? That’s the way other coaches do it. Not that a new head coach needs to follow the pack in every way, but it does pay to stop and think about why they do what they do. There’s a reason Al Gore invented a round wheel instead of a square one. It’s a smoother ride.

Naming names generally isn’t a great way for a coach to instill loyalty in players. Hall of Fame Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, for example, was fond of saying, “I don’t know, I missed that play. I was getting a drink of water when it happened,” after one of his players made a particularly dumb play.

And then there is the state of the quarterback situation at K-State, where the Wildcats are at once two-deep and too shallow. One, two, three quarterbacks have transferred. Kevin Lopina, Allen Webb and Allan Evridge. Gone. That’s the bad news. The good news for K-State is one big reason they left: Quarterback Josh Freeman, a 6-foot-6, 238-pound true freshman out of Kansas City (Mo.) Grandview High is the future, the very near future most believe. Dylan Meier, older brother of Kansas red-shirt freshman Kerry, is the present.

Quarterbacks aren’t the only ones putting Manhattan in the rear-view mirror. Tight end Nate Prater told the Omaha World-Herald he intended to transfer, and said, “There’s some funny stuff going on down there.”

Such as, according to Prater, some players being allowed to participate in camp, despite flunking the conditioning test.

“I don’t know if he wants to play his recruits,” Prater theorized.

Who knows, maybe Prince is the latest football genius whose methods will be copied by a generation of coaches. Maybe not. I’m not feeling it. Either way, this figures to be a long season. It’s already feeling like a bridge year that takes K-State back to being a basketball school first.