The Kansas University football team’s offense was its bold, brash self in the second half of a 35-33 comeback victory Saturday at Iowa State. The Jayhawks went for it on fourth down and with the lead kept throwing the ball, instead of milking the clock.

“We have to,” coach Mark Mangino said. “It’s part of the makeup of our football team. We tell the kids all the time we need to be aggressive. … You can’t get in your play calling and say, ‘We’re going to sit on this.’ In my career, I’ve always noticed that when I’ve tried to sit on things, things blow up. When you have that go-get-’em mentality, that attack mentality, the kids keep their edge, they’ve got that mind-set to be aggressive, and it worked out.”

The defense, neither as confident nor loaded with playmakers as the offense, could benefit from mimicking that aggressive style. Instead of trying to make things happen, it looks as if the pass defense forever guards against the big play. Cornerbacks tend to look like a center fielder stationing himself near the warning track, letting the singles fall in, driven by paranoia that a flyball might sail over his head for extra bases.

“It wasn’t just that,” sophomore cornerback Chris Harris said. “Whatever we were in, they were checking it, and once they checked it, they threw it short because we were in a deeper zone call. It was just pretty much that they came in with a good game plan, and we just adjusted with the calls and came out and shut it down in the second half.”

The knee-jerk-response solution is that if their defenses are that easy to recognize, players should be doing things to disguise coverages. Sounds easy, but that’s not without risks for players so young and so short on confidence at the moment. Disguising a defense would mean that players are lining up in less than the perfect place to get the job done. Aqib Talib had the savvy and speed to get away with doing so. The same can’t be said for his replacements. Holding their own without getting fancy has presented a daunting enough challenge.

Even Harris, who had an impressive freshman season, hasn’t performed as well.

“That was probably the worst we’ve ever played,” Harris said after the Iowa State game. “Including me, that’s probably the worst game I’ve played since I played football.”

The hope was that the pass defense would improve during the two weeks of practice without a game. It didn’t, and Mangino, as he sometimes does when dealing with a fragile unit, pointed a finger of blame at himself.

“There were some technical adjustments made by our defensive staff,” Mangino said of the second-half improvement. “I thought we were a little cautious in the secondary (in the first half). Our kids don’t want to get beat over the top. Maybe that’s because I kept saying for two weeks, ‘Don’t get beat over the top.’ They said, ‘Well, OK, we’re not going to get beat over the top. We’re going to let them catch hitches all day and try to tackle them.’ Well, that doesn’t work, either.”

Simple math didn’t work in the preseason when trying to guess which side of the ball would experience more growing pains, the offense or defense. The offense returned six starters, the defense nine.