So, do the turnovers make the defense, or does the defense make the turnovers?

Or neither?

If you’re looking for concrete evidence, Kansas University’s football team won’t give it to you. Last year’s defense created just 21 turnovers, despite being top 15 in the country in terms of yardage allowed.

The defense in 2004 – not nearly as smothering – had 27 takeaways, tops in the Big 12 Conference.

That shows there’s no definite correlation. But none is needed for KU coach Mark Mangino to know that he wants as many takeaways as possible – which is why KU is revisiting the fundamentals of turnover creation in practice this week before Friday’s game at Toledo.

“There’s rip-and-strip drills, pick drills, gang tackling, stripping the ball, playing the ball to its highest point in the pass game,” Mangino said. “Those are the things that we always drill, and we put an emphasis on really focusing to drill on it this week.”

The Jayhawks created no turnovers against Louisiana-Monroe and have just two on the season – a Sadiq Muhammed interception and a fumble recovery by Eric Washington against Northwestern State.

KU, meanwhile, has four giveaways, continuing a trend Mangino wants to put an end to this season.

The Jayhawks have had just one positive turnover margin since Mangino became coach, and that was the plus-4 (27 takeaways, 23 giveaways) margin that the 2004 team produced. It was largely fueled by Charles Gordon’s NCAA-leading seven interceptions, with Rodney Harris, Tony Stubbs and Theo Baines also roaming the secondary. Kansas had 19 interceptions that year.

Last year’s defense, with Gordon, Aqib Talib and a super front seven, didn’t take the ball away near as much. The team’s superb play against the run, though, negated a huge need to.

“You can play good defense and do everything well, but you’re not getting turnovers,” Mangino said. “The reason why that is sometimes is that people know you have a reputation for playing the ball, and they work ball security extra hard and want to make sure they know we’re going to tackle the football and do those kind of things.”

Certainly, though, KU’s coaches always will try to force turnovers, because they do nothing but help. And seeing the takeaways off to a slow start has the staff getting right to work on making sure it’s not a liability this season.

“If you have a really good defense, usually you have a lot of turnovers,” Mangino said. “It’s unusual that as good as our defense was last year, we had a small dropoff. But we’ve got 10 more games to play (this year). I think that will pick up just by the style of defense we play.”