LJWorld.com

The thing about sawing wood is you have to keep your head down, or you might lose a finger. You can't hold your nose in the air when you're sawing wood.

All signs point to the Kansas University football players still keeping their heads down, still "sawing wood," as coach Mark Mangino is fond of saying.

The smart guess is the Jayhawks won't get fat heads looking at themselves on "SportsCenter," which is to athletes what a mirror is to a beauty queen.

Why won't they? For the same reason they didn't unravel two seasons ago when they were 0-4 in the Big 12. Had the players pulled their heads up from the pieces of wood they were sawing back then, they would have seen a world laughing at them. They would have soaked in gloom-and-doom predictions, and they would have started to believe they were as bad as their reviews, as hopeless as the predictions made about them.

Instead, Kansas bullied Missouri, 13-3, the beginning of a season-ending 4-1 stretch that included victories against Nebraska, Iowa State and Houston.

They turned deaf ears to the opinions of the outside world then, and they are doing the same now. That team that finished 7-5 had senior leadership. This year's 8-0 team, which has more depth on defense and far more talent on offense, has senior leadership. Last season's 6-6 team didn't have much of that beyond center David Ochoa.

Mangino does a terrific job keeping the players' eyes on the target, even when he orally attacks them. Here's how he gets away with pushing the players so hard without them reaching the point they tune him out: He has them all convinced that he and his staff can make them better players. They all are surrounded by examples of players who've improved so much since coming to KU. They don't want to be left behind, so they put their heads down and saw wood.

"That's where the games are won is at practice, man," senior defensive tackle James McClinton said. "You can't go through the motions at practice and expect to win. That's what the coach says, it's won in practice, it's won at weights, it's won in meetings. You've got to build up your techniques and your talents, instead of just going through the motions. I want to get better. I want to improve. Take advantage of the opportunity. That's the way I see it. You either get better or worse, that's the way I see it. That's what coach says."

Nationally, the nickname for the Kansas football team is "The Fighting Manginos," coined by ESPN's Rece Davis. Locally, "Sawing Wood" has more traction.

"Sawing wood in the old days before they had power saws, if you were going to build your own house, you didn't have a choice," Mangino said. "If your arm was sore, you were tired, your back hurt, you didn't have a choice. If you're going to get the house built, you had to keep sawing. I really didn't mean that to be a catch phrase here. It's something I believe in. I've heard it before, and I just kind of thought it fit here at Kansas."

Mangino said the team isn't "getting caught up in records."

Third-year KU law student Adam Davis can't say the same. Davis researched the top 15 schools in the BCS rankings to see how many road victories they had against BCS schools that have winning conference records. Kansas has three. No other school has more than one. Interesting.

Just don't tell the players, or one of them might saw off a finger.