LJWorld.com

Ratings, shmatings!

Kansas, or any other college football team, is no better off on the charts than its last game. While the 9-0 Jayhawks are fourth in the BCS standings and no worse than sixth in a variety of polls, they will fade from major prominence if they don't defeat Oklahoma State. With at least 10 victories they'll get a pretty good bowl game, but not the brass-ring type of prize this club really wants - and will deserve if it can at least reach the Big 12 title game.

As for Stillwater, coach Mark Mangino will use the same psychology that imaginative Lou Holtz employed while tutoring six college teams before he became a television analyst. Lou recently offered a facsimile of one of his collegiate pep talks, and it applied perfectly to this Kansas team.

Holtz's approach is a perfect example of how to play them one at a time: "It doesn't matter what the polls say, what your record is, where you stand in the conference, the nation, what team we're playing next week or the week after that. You have one thing to prove - that you're the better of the two teams that will be on that field tonight. Do that, and all those other things will take care of themselves."

Mangino has been drilling that home to his Jayhawks after allowing them to savor the 76-39 rout of Nebraska. The players, with tutelage from the coaches, aren't yapping about how good they were against NU or where they stand in the polls. They're a cool, confident and focused bunch who believe in their system. They'll be ready for an excellent OSU gang playing at home.

KU, though, figures it owes the Cowboys a lump or two. OSU has won the last five meetings. The last Kansas victory was 22-17 at Stillwater in 1995, before T. Boone Pickens was pouring zillions of dollars into the till.

Mangino says he isn't disturbed that his defensive unit gave up so much yardage and 39 points to lifeless Nebraska because all the things KU did to help the Huskers are correctable. Yet tackling must be a lot sharper than it was when Jayhawks would get Huskers under control only to let them break free. The system may have been solid, the execution wasn't. Mangino may, indeed, execute somebody if it's not better at OSU.

But again, all KU has to do to prove it merits glitzy ratings is to be the Alpha Male in Stillwater. If Kansas takes care of business, all the ratings-nutty fans can speculate how high the Jayhawks might go rather than how far they'll fall.

¢ Much has been said about KU's being 9-0 for the first time since 1908. Great, but coach Bert Kennedy's gang also created an 18-0 run for the current team to shoot at. KU closed 1907 with a win over Missouri, ran off its 9-0 in 1908, then won eight more games to fashion an 18-0 sty-stinger before falling to, you guessed it, Missouri in the 1909 finale in Kansas City. Such success may never again be duplicated here.

As for Kansas and Missouri in Kansas City, the first 16 meetings were in K.C. The 1907 game was shifted to St. Joseph, Mo., after a hassle about usage fees for a K.C. field. Back to K.C. for 1908 and 1909, then the first KU-MU game played on a campus was here in 1910, a 3-3 tie.

More history. The 1912 season saw KU's first official homecoming game, a 12-3 KU victory in Lawrence. Then the 1913 game, a 3-0 KU loss, was in Columbia.

But the most prestigious battle in the series could be if KU shows up in Kansas City with an 11-0, MU has a 10-1 and all the marbles will be on the table.

But first, Oklahoma State, boys!