Keegan: Gauntlet awaits Jayhawks

Your Kansas University football magnet schedule fell off the refrigerator and you accidentally swept it up and tossed it in the garbage? Forgot to take your pocket schedule out of your pocket and it shriveled up in the wash?

Not to worry. Just cut out the top 10 of the Associated Press Top 25 poll in today’s paper. It’s pretty much the same as the KU schedule.

For all the unpredictability of this college football season, one constant does exist. Another week passes, and the KU schedule looks even tougher than it did the previous week.

Just this past week, four of the top 10 teams lost: USC, Georgia, Florida and Wisconsin. Meanwhile, the toughest teams on the Kansas schedule just keep moving on up.

Remarkably, five of the top 10 teams in the AP poll released Sunday afternoon fill a line on the Kansas schedule.

KU plays No. 1 Oklahoma, No. 4 Missouri, No. 5 Texas and No. 7 Texas Tech. The Jayhawks already played No. 10 South Florida, losing on a last-second field goal.

Last year, the schedule looked on the soft side before the season and grew softer looking as the season progressed and Nebraska and Texas A&M faded from preseason expectations.

That was then. This is now: No school in the country can lay claim to having five top-10 teams on the schedule, and only one, Oklahoma State, has as many as four.

Kansas is in the calm-before-the storm phase of the schedule. KU travels to Ames, Iowa, for a Saturday game against Iowa State and then plays Colorado in Lawrence. Barring an upset, KU will take a 5-1 record into the second half of the season, at which point the path to a good bowl game gets mighty rocky.

After the Colorado game, four of the remaining six opponents are now ranked in the top seven in the nation.

In consecutive weeks, Kansas plays at No. 1 Oklahoma and at home against No. 7 Texas Tech. After a two-week run against unranked foes Kansas State and at Nebraska, the Jayhawks face No. 5 Texas, take a week off, and then battle the traffic and No. 4 Missouri at Arrowhead Stadium.

On paper, Kansas has several factors weighing against it in the face of such a demanding lineup of foes. The offensive line couldn’t get any surge on fourth-and-one against Sam Houston State, and quarterback Todd Reesing was stopped for no gain. Run blocking and pass protection haven’t been strengths. The pass rush has been nearly invisible, and the young secondary hasn’t looked good so far. None of the running backs seems to have mastered the art of using blockers.

For all their flaws, the Jayhawks still rank 16th in the nation, one of six Big 12 schools in the top 25.

They must have something going for them. For one thing, Mark Mangino has a way of getting his team up for all games, regardless of the quality of the competition. For another, they have a quarterback who keeps them in every game, is 15-2 as a starter and does his best work when his team is trailing.

Just as glancing at the top 10 can fray the nerves of any KU football fan.

But don’t forget, thinking about defending against Reesing is enough to make a fan of any team on KU’s schedule grow jumpy.