KU's Daymond Patterson (15), makes a dive into the end zone for a touchdown in the second half against Georgia Tech. The Jayhawks won the game 28-25.

Four football seasons ago, the first game of Turner Gill’s two-year run as Kansas University’s head coach bummed out the town just three seasons removed from a 12-1 record and an Orange Bowl bash.

The 6-3 final in a loss to North Dakota State read more like a baseball score, but the game was played at a much slower pace than that.

Somehow, the Jayhawks rebounded so well they defeated heavily favored Georgia Tech the next week.

“Looking back on it, you can’t call it an inferior opponent by any means, but at the time they weren’t considered the North Dakota State that everybody knows about now,” former KU receiver/cornerback Daymond Patterson said by phone from Mesquite, Texas.

NDSU of the Football Championship Subdivision defeated Kansas State last season and Iowa State this season, giving the Bison more Big 12 road victories in three tries than Kansas has managed in its past six seasons.

Patterson made the biggest play of the Georgia Tech upset, spinning, bouncing, cutting and leaping his way to a spectacular 32-yard touchdown on a screen pass from Jordan Webb.

One game into Charlie Weis’ third year as the replacement for Gill, KU stands in a similar spot, coming off a disappointing game vs. an FCS opponent, trying to figure out a way to defeat a heavily favored ACC team, this time Duke.

“I think having any tough game is going to help you. You’d rather the game be a win than a loss,” Patterson said, gently reminding me that his alma mater did in fact defeat Southeast Missouri State, 34-28. “That (loss to NDSU) really showed us we needed to step up more in practice in everything we were doing. We were like, ‘If we can’t beat North Dakota State, or for that matter score on North Dakota State, then who can we score on?’ That pushed us to do a lot better.”

So did the reaction to the loss.

“Everybody was down on us,” Patterson said. “I can remember in the school newspaper and every newspaper we saw, the score was supposed to be 52-3, Georgia Tech beating us by 50 points, 45 points, easily. That was in the backs of our minds, like, ‘These guys have no respect for us, the reporters and everyone saying it’s going to be a rout, so let’s go out and prove different.’ “

The oddsmakers made Kansas a 20-point underdog against Duke.

“I think they can rally, and the best thing about it is they get to rally off a win,” Patterson said. “It was a game where it shouldn’t have been anywhere near as close. Now they’ve learned, ‘Hey, we’ve got to finish. Let’s not let that happen again.’ And they didn’t have to lose to learn it.”

Patterson trains athletes for Raw Power Sports, a business founded by his father, after whom he was named. He said talented football prospects ask him about Kansas. When they do, he said he doesn’t moan about having to play for three head coaches on two sides of the ball for five position coaches.

Instead, he shares with them his belief that offensive coordinator John Reagan will bring about an exciting transformation from an offense that has been among the nation’s worst in recent years.

“I tell them Lawrence, Kansas, is a great town, and right now the football program is down, but with coach Reagan doing what he does, I honestly think Kansas is a place where a lot of players from down here are going to want to come very soon,” Patterson said. “Look at what he’s been able to do at Rice, what we were able to do when we were running basically the same offense that he’s running now. A lot of people are going to see if you can put up numbers at KU, why not go to KU? That’s what Baylor’s done. They went from being the bottom-feeder to having an exciting offense. Now Baylor can get any athlete out of Texas who has speed to come to that school.”

Patterson said he was impressed with how hard De’Andre Mann and Corey Avery ran and with an offensive system that he said will only get better as the season deepens.

“I feel like we have more of a college-type of offense again. Once we get that going again, that’s going to prove to be big because you can do so many more things out of the sets that Reagan ran,” Patterson said. “And he proved that at Rice. They didn’t have the best athletes, but they were able to compete with a lot of good teams.

“When you find a good system that works, I feel that’s really important to run a college system in college football. I think that will prove to be really big as the year goes on. It’s like when (Mark) Mangino was there, we were KU every week. They had to stop us. We were not going to change for them.”

Nobody had a better view of the coaching turnstile at KU than Patterson.

“It’s not the best thing to do in college football because you have to be stable. … If the players are leaving and the coaches are leaving and nobody ever gets used to each other, it’s hard,” Patterson said. “At KU, we have plenty of athletes. It’s just hard for anybody to get used to a system and be able to adjust their skills to the system. So hopefully we can get something consistent going with Reagan and Charlie that will help our school.”

Pulling off an upset against a favored ACC school would be a good place to start in terms of improving the psyche of those in the program and those yearning to support a winner. But it would only be a start. Kansas wasn’t able to parlay the Georgia Tech upset into anything better, just as the Jayhawks weren’t able to capture any momentum after defeating West Virginia a year ago.

Positive starts beat negative ones, but as everyone said after last week’s scary victory, you have to finish.