Kansas offensive lineman Brad Thorson (76) fends off Baylor linebacker Tevin Elliott as quarterback Jordan Webb looks to pass on Oct. 2 in Waco, Texas. KU coach Turner Gill has been stressing knockdowns, any legal act by an offensive player that puts a defensive player on the ground.

The Kansas University football team’s coaching staff, with its decades of combined experience, has been around long enough to know that one of the best ways to motivate young men is to give them a goal and reward them for reaching it.

With that, the idea of cranking up the team’s knockdowns was born.

By simple definition, a knockdown is any legal act by an offensive player that puts a defensive player on the ground. But the definition KU coach Turner Gill and the Jayhawks are searching for goes far beyond that.

“We need to be knocking people on the ground and putting them on their backs,” Gill said. “We must play physical, and we must play with confidence.”

Thanks to a new initiative installed this week, the Jayhawks also must focus on the number 80.

“The times we’ve been successful offensively, and even defensively, we definitely have had a lot of knockdowns, we’ve had that 80-plus,” Gill said. “It all depends on how many plays you have, so I think 80 is a pretty good number. We’d like to get into the 100s.”

Though the majority of the knockdowns are expected to come from KU’s offensive linemen — junior center Jeremiah Hatch currently leads the team in that category, with sophomore tackle Tanner Hawkinson not far behind — knockdowns will be tallied by any player on the offense, including the wide receivers.

“Actually, we receivers really do pride ourselves on getting knockdowns, going out there and cutting defensive backs,” junior Daymond Patterson said. “When you make somebody miss, we count that as a knockdown.”

For the most part, the knockdowns are designed and emphasized to spring guys like Patterson into the open field. But that does not mean that he hasn’t been able to pay attention to what’s going on behind him. On one play, during KU’s 28-25 victory against Georgia Tech in Week 2, KU quarterback Jordan Webb recorded a monster knockdown that went on to garner three different entries on YouTube, which got more than 7,000 views.

“That one really pumped us up,” Patterson said. “It just showed us that our quarterback’s a competitor, and he’s willing to stick his head in there, and he’s not just gonna be running around avoiding contact. When you see your quarterback out there doing something like that, it just makes you think, ‘OK, I need to be doing that, if not more.’ I bet if he could take it off, he wouldn’t have that red jersey on (in practice).”

As for the specific goal of 80 or more knockdowns per week, Hawkinson and red-shirt freshman lineman Riley Spencer both said 80 was realistic.

“It’s always something that we’ve been striving for, to be more physical than the other teams,” Spencer said. “The knockdowns are a way we can show it.”

Added Hawkinson, who said he would proceed with his sights set on attaining the plaque that will be given to the player with the most knockdowns as the end of the year: “Obviously, when you can get guys on the ground, you’re going to get some guys free, with running backs and keeping guys off the quarterback. So it’s a good goal for us. Sometimes you can get by with just getting them cut off, but if you can get ’em on the ground, it’s just a lot better to do that, so it’s just kind of a mind-set of, ‘OK, I’m going to do this on every play,’ instead of just getting them cut off.”