Kansas quarterback Jalon Daniels passes during the first half of an NCAA college football game against Illinois on Saturday, Sept. 7, 2024, in Champaign, Ill. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

In the week leading up to Kansas’ loss to Illinois, new KU offensive coordinator Jeff Grimes was asked if he thought it might be an advantage that the Illini hadn’t really seen much of how he planned to operate the Jayhawks’ offense.

“I hope so,” he responded.

When it came time to play, though, the Illini were the ones with the element of surprise. From when they brought out a four-down-linemen look on the first play onward, as KU quarterback Jalon Daniels said, they diverged from what he expected.

“They came out and did a lot of stuff that they didn’t show on film,” Daniels said, “and I feel like they just came out here and made a lot of plays.”

Sure, Grimes and the Jayhawks busted out their fair share of wrinkles on Saturday night — wildcat looks, eclectic pre-snap motions, odd personnel groupings, plenty of the stuff that defined the KU offense in years past under Andy Kotelnicki. But what ended up being the most surprising part of the Jayhawks’ offense on Saturday night was how ill-equipped it proved to be in key moments.

When the Jayhawks could have chosen to throw down the field, they repeatedly went conservative. Later, when they did opt to take more aggressive shots, Daniels couldn’t make the throws he needed to, resulting in one of the worst starts of his career. It was a display of startlingly poor timing, with blame shared between play caller and personnel, that — yes, even if KU’s defense couldn’t get off the field in the fourth quarter — led directly to the Jayhawks’ 23-17 defeat.

Now, to be fair, and to acknowledge a point that head coach Lance Leipold made in no uncertain terms postgame, it might not be accurate to say the Jayhawks “struggled” offensively, writ large.

“We gained more yards than they did, we had a 100-yard rusher … we were 6 of 13 on third downs, we didn’t get a fourth-down conversion,” he said. “You know, you’re playing a good Big Ten football team. It’s not going to be like playing on air by any stretch of the imagination.”

Indeed, Devin Neal ran for 101 yards, but received just 14 carries even as the teams were never separated by more than one score at any point in the game. Meanwhile, Daniels threw the ball 32 times and produced just 141 yards, which was his lowest yards-per-attempt mark since he took over as KU’s starter in late 2021. As Grimes has said, KU strives for balance, and the Jayhawks did end up with 33 runs to 32 passes — but precious few of those runs went to the Jayhawks’ record-setting tailback.

The 32 passes, too, left a lot to be desired. Daniels threw three picks, outnumbering his two touchdowns, but it wasn’t all on him that he ended up with such an ugly statline.

How it happened

Early in the second quarter, KU ended up with a third-and-13 on Illinois’ 18-yard line, theoretically well within the field-goal range of any collegiate kicker, including Tabor Allen. Instead of going for a shot at the end zone, Grimes called a play that resulted in Daniels throwing a quick screen to Luke Grimm, who ran for seven yards.

Daniels, whose deep on-the-run connection to Grimm had been pivotal in KU’s 2023 victory over Illinois, completed just one pass for more than eight yards in the first 33 minutes of game time this time around. That included, on the ensuing drive after the third-and-13 screen, another pass to Grimm that went short of the sticks on fourth-and-2, after which Grimm was unable to fight forward for a conversion. It also included, improbably, another third-and-13 screen at a key moment.

KU got the ball up 10-6 late in the first half, and Grimes dug into his bag of tricks for a fake speed option between Daniels and Daniel Hishaw Jr. that actually developed into a reverse to Quentin Skinner. But Skinner mishandled a pitch and ended up losing seven yards, and Illinois, with three timeouts, opted to use one to try to give itself a chance of getting the ball back.

To dig the Jayhawks out of that hole, KU then opted for a swing pass to tight end Jared Casey. Not only is Casey far from the Jayhawks’ most threatening player in space, the route also took him close to the boundary, and he ended up going out of bounds. That saved the Illini a timeout by stopping the clock, but it also meant the Jayhawks could have felt more free to take a chance on third-and-13.

Instead, they set up a screen for Skinner. Daniels threw a pick-six to Xavier Scott.

“I didn’t get the chance to see him,” Daniels said. “I seen the D-end right in front of me, so I had to try to throw over the D-end, and he just made a play right behind the D-end.”

That constituted the single biggest momentum swing — and play overall, possibly — of the game, giving Illinois a 13-10 lead, but KU wasn’t going to try swing it back with what little time remained. It had 26 seconds left from its own 32 and Daniels handed to Hishaw once to run out the clock.

“We weren’t going to give them an opportunity to have something else happen,” Leipold said. “Momentum was clearly in their favor. We went aggressive the series before and it didn’t work. We weren’t going to give them another one … We got to calm it back down and settle our guys down.”

As Leipold noted, they ended up driving for a touchdown their next time out anyway.

Later in the second half, though, the screen-heavy approach of the second quarter gave way to a new sort of aggression that did not pay off. Daniels got more opportunities to take chances, but he did not complete a pass at any point between his touchdown to Lawrence Arnold and the final minute of the game, a period of nearly 20 minutes that encompassed three KU drives.

The first drive was an awkward one. The referees picked up a flag for defensive pass interference on Daniels’ series-opening incompletion, drawing the ire of Leipold, who said postgame, “I hear a lot of ‘The philosophy is not to throw flags, so when you throw one you better be sure.’ So how did you become unsure then?” The next time Daniels threw the ball, after Casey had narrowly gotten a first down, he underthrew Skinner going for the end zone.

The second, early in the fourth quarter, gave KU another chance to extend its lead. Neal ran for seven yards, which was about his average on the night, before Daniels and Grimm couldn’t connect on a deep play-action pass and then Daniels overthrew Skinner on the opposite side of the field. The third drive, with KU trailing, featured just one pass play that got blown up by pressure.

“Now it’s easy to second-guess and say ‘Well, why didn’t you just give it to (Neal) again on second down?'” Leipold said of the second drive. “But the way our offense is built, how we’ve done it, is you’re aggressive and you mix it up. I’m not going to take away from the play calls or things like that because when you’re clicking and things (have) worked, we’ve always enjoyed watching the results of that and tonight we just didn’t quite have all that.”

Indeed, the foundation of KU’s offense has been the ability to take those sorts of chances. Since Grimes’ arrival last winter, the Jayhawks have continued to take pride in a fearless play style. But in their first real opportunity to prove they could bring that ethos into a new season, they took chances at all the wrong moments.