Kansas junior linebacker Courtney Arnick, left, brings down West Virginia quarterback Skyler Howard, right, in the Jayhawks game against the West Virginia Mountaineers Saturday, Nov. 21, 2015, at Memorial Stadium.

As discouraged as Kansas University’s football players felt Saturday after a 49-0 home loss to West Virginia, the Jayhawks have plenty of incentives to do everything they can to move on, forget all the negatives and mistakes and prepare for their next game as if it were the most important one in the nation.

KU senior defensive end Ben Goodman said the next few days will be intense because of the finality of the upcoming Sunflower Showdown with Kansas State (3 p.m. Saturday at Memorial Stadium, televised on FOX Sports 1). It’s KU’s final game of 2015, the Jayhawks’ last chance to avoid a winless season, and their rivals from Manhattan will be on the other side of the line of scrimmage.

“It definitely makes it a little bit easier,” Goodman said of getting over their latest defeat. “It’s K-State week. If you can’t get excited for K-State week, you shouldn’t be playing on the field.”

Kansas hasn’t defeated its rival since 2008, when Mark Mangino was head coach and Todd Reesing played quarterback.

David Beaty, then a wide-receivers coach at Kansas, audibly sighed during the WVU postgame news conference after saying his team looked forward to the upcoming rivalry game because, in that moment, the appeal of facing Kansas State (4-6 overall, 1-6 Big 12) wasn’t going to help him deal with the blowout loss his team had just suffered.

“And we’ve got to go back to the drawing board this week, because we obviously had some breakdowns this week with a team that runs the ball pretty well, with the quarterback, just like K-State does,” Beaty said after the Mountaineers had three 100-yard rushers in a game — including QB Skyler Howard’s team-leading 129 — for the first time since 1969. “So we’ve got some things we’ve got to go get shored up as we head into this game.”

WVU finished with 630 yards of total offense, but KU’s defense accounted for just one aspect of Beaty’s problems. The Kansas offense, which totaled just 127 passing yards and 94 rushing yards, went three-and-out on 10 of its 17 possessions and turned the ball over on four others.

“You know, and then offensively, we’ve got to find a way to create more offense than what we got,” Beaty said of another challenge for KU (0-11, 0-8), “to be able to pull that thing out next week in a big game, a great competition, next week against those guys.”

The Jayhawks could help themselves out by not digging a massive hole. WVU led 28-0 before the second quarter even began. And while offensive turnovers directly led to 14 West Virginia points right away, linebacker Joe Dineen said that’s no excuse.

“But as a defense, we’re supposed to be the firefighters,” Dineen countered. “We’re supposed to put out the momentum, and we didn’t do that (Saturday).”

The Jayhawks have just a few practices left to recover from their latest loss and put forth a superior showing against their rivals.

Said Goodman: “We practice hard each and every week, but this is definitely gonna be the hardest week we ever practice. It’s K-State week, it’s senior week, big rival game, so we’re definitely gonna give it our all.”