Kansas cornerback Dexter McDonald turns upfield after grabbing an interception during the third quarter on Saturday, Sept. 6, 2014 at Memorial Stadium.

Optimism for the 2014 Kansas University football team lasted all of one wildly entertaining quarter, 15 minutes of game clock. And then the recent past spilled into the present.

By the end of Saturday night’s 34-28 victory against Southeast Missouri State, a question that too often bubbles to the surface of the minds of those in attendance for season openers could be asked with at least a hint of credibility: Will this football team win another game this season?

The answer is maybe, which is another way of saying maybe not.

Oh, there were some spectacular individual performances, all right. Senior cornerback Dexter McDonald showed every bit of his big-time talent with two interceptions for 72 yards in returns and two pass breakups. Middle linebacker Ben Heeney played at less than 100 percent physically and still made big contributions.

Receivers Nick Harwell and Tony Pierson had big nights, as did running backs De’Andre Mann and Corey Avery. Quarterback Montell Cozart still needs to add some polish, but showed he has come a long way in a short amount of time.

But in the end, the most underrated roster subtraction played a huge role in enabling SEMO to come back from a 24-0 first-quarter deficit.

Cornerback Kevin Short becoming the latest unexplained departure from a junior-college recruit didn’t trigger headlines as loud as the transfer of quarterback Jake Heaps and the season-ending injuries on consecutive days to senior running backs Brandon Bourbon and Taylor Cox.

Yet, Short’s absence damaged this team more significantly than all three of the others combined, even though Bourbon and Cox were primed for big seasons. Mann and Avery softened that blow. The same could not be said for anybody joining McDonald in the secondary.

Short, like McDonald, was a big, fast, confident shut-down cornerback. Having one on each side of the field would have enabled Kansas to blitz with abandon, forcing quarterbacks into hurried throws that would lead to turnovers.

Now, with just one shut-down cornerback in McDonald, Kansas can’t gamble as much with blitzes. And teams can throw away from McDonald now. That’s what SEMO quarterback Kyle Snyder did in rallying the Redhawks back with three fourth-quarter touchdown passes. Snyder avoided McDonald the way pitchers used to avoided the strike zone with Barry Bonds at the plate in big moments.

Snyder did make one mistake regarding McDonald, completing a pass against him for the team’s initial first down on third-and-8 in the second quarter. The completion turned McDonald into a revenge-seeking monster the rest of the night.

“My goal today was to have zero catches and they caught a ball on me,” McDonald said. “I already was focused, but that made me focus even more and it fueled a fire under me to go even harder than I was already going.”

Nothing about the way McDonald did his job suggested he was taking advantage of weak competition. Everything about it screamed big-time Big 12 cornerback. Five passes thrown his way equaled one completion, two interceptions and two balls knocked to the turf.

A big, fast force, McDonald twists and turns his body with the agility of a much smaller man when reacting to the football. Watching McDonald play the ball with such skill made Short’s late departure from the program all the more difficult to stomach. 

That’s not where McDonald’s head was or will be again, though.

“Right now we’re trying to just move forward,” McDonald said when asked about Short. “We don’t really have time to think about things that are in the past. We just won that game. Now Duke’s next week.”

McDonald had a phenomenal performance and the other cornerbacks did not. He knows his role with teammates after a game like that.

“I play cornerback and so do they. I feel like as a cornerback, we have the toughest job on the defense,” he said. “Balls are going to get caught on you, and as a cornerback you have to have a short-term memory. My job is basically just to encourage them and let them know it’s happened to me before and it happens to everybody.”

It happens less to teams that have defensive lines that can do a better job of pressuring the quarterback than KU’s did Saturday and it happens less to teams with two gifted quarterbacks than those with one.