Fresh off an emphatic win over Tennessee Tech in the season opener, Kansas football will hit the road to open Big 12 play with a game against West Virginia. KU dominated in all three phases against Tennesee Tech last Friday, notching over 500 yards of total offense and nearly 300 yards rushing. Defensively, KU held Tennesee Tech to under 3.0 yards per play for the entire game. But now, the Jayhawks will face a Mountaineers squad who are looking to bounce back from a close defeat to rivals Pitt. In that game, West Virginia gained 404 yards of offense with a blended attack of pass and run. Defensively, the Mountaineers allowed the Panthers to gain 6.2 yards per play but 308 of their 384 yards came through the air.

To preview the upcoming matchup, KU's coordinators Andy Kotelnicki and Brian Borland met with the media. Here are 10 things the coordinators said on Wednesday...

Andy Kotelnicki on KU's offense in Week 1 and what he wants to see in Week 2...

"I think when you look into football in general, when you play first game, there's always first game mistakes that occur. And a lot of them come in the form of delay of games and sloppy procedure penalties, and too many guys or not enough guys on the field. For us, in the first game to be pretty clean is a testament to our kids and the other position coaches and how they went about preparing themselves to do those sort of things, which is what the expectation should be. We should be able to expect to get that stuff done the right way. There's always significant improvement typically from week one to week two, if you allow yourself to really focus on what you needed to improve on from week one. There's a lot of, at least in my experience years of coaching, there's a lot of things that happen in the game where sometimes you go and say, 'See, we talked about this and then it came up.' or 'Hey, you understand now what I mean, when we talk this way or why we have to get lined up like this?' There wasn't a ton of that in our first game, so I'm happy and pleased with how that looked, but now we're going into a different environment. We're going on the road, and so we have to make sure that's another challenge, another distraction that we have to be able to center our focus on what we do in our huddle and how we communicate and what we do."

Kotelnicki on KU's offensive approach and if the staff wants to control the clock with the running game...

"I don't know if I'd ever say that you move past that because I think how an offense controls a game, time management is maybe one metric that somebody would use to do that. Staying on the field, keeping your defense off the field. At the end of the day, and I've talked about this before, our evolution needs to be on offense to make sure that we're finishing those drives however they look. And the most important metric in football that people measure is your points per possession. And then when you're on the field, you need to finish with points. If it takes 20 plays to go do that, fantastic. It takes one great, but we want to be able to end those things with touchdowns. And so every opponent that you play, there's a recipe to win the game, right? And sometimes that a recipe might be, yeah, let's try to control the ball, let's try to stay in the field and how does that look? Sometimes that might be, 'Hey, you'd be able to stay on the field for X number of plays, but you're going to have a big play potential to follow that up.' So whatever that is for an opponent that you would face every week, it might be a little bit different, but generally speaking, you want to make sure that you're finishing the drives with points, you really do."

Kotelnicki on the performance  Ky Thomas  had against WVU in the bowl game and if he goes back to Thomas for prep this week...

"A little bit. I mean have those discussions a little bit, but I think you’re going back into learning a new offense and all these sorts of things. I think he's played enough football. He's smart enough to recognize maybe the differences in what that game was, or at least in the offense that he had been in, to now. But yeah, matter of fact, I just said, 'Hey, I was watching film again and every time I look it's like Hey, that's you.' And so he chuckles and 'Yeah, I remember that play.' And so talking about that, maybe a little bit to what the point was made before about, there are some new faces on that side of the ball defensively and they evolved too, since then, since whenever that game was played. There's been evolution for sure in their personnel, just like ours."

Kotelnicki on West Virginia's front seven...

"Their front, and it speaks to their defense schematically overall, is they're a very, very multiple group. Their front seven, they do a lot of different things. In their back half, they do a lot of things and they connect the dots pretty well, right? So as an offense, you can put a lot of stress on yourself if you try to see too much, right? If you try to see everything, you're going to end up seeing nothing. And so it'll be important for our guys to make sure that their, what I call game day eyes, are focused on what needs to be focused on. Whatever gap they're supposed to have or player or however they're supposed to run the route. They're concerned about their discipline, their eyes and we're not falling for the old sucker punch, right? Okay, because that's what can happen. So their multiplicity is definitely something that is unique to them."

Kotelnicki on the points of emphasis for the offense this week...

"No doubt. Well, turnovers, right? That was a critical one right out the gate. And we talk about wanting to avoid playing bad football and that's the worst kind of ball. So how they happen, why they happen, to address it, to point it out on film and to say, 'Hey, listen, this is one we talk about, maybe the depth of the route or the angle or where your eyes need to be, or your drop as a quarterback, or how we carried the ball or whatever it is.' I use the examples as a teacher, I say to the guys, I go, 'Hey, here we are, we talk about mastering the mundane as an offense, doing the mundane things well.' Drill work can be very mundane to work on the fundamentals. When you go out there and we make a mistake, I present to the players, I said as a coach and a teacher, what does that tell me? That just tells me we need to keep doing it. We have to do it more. Right? We have to keep doing it. We don't have it figured out yet. And so any of those little mistakes that you've talked about, even though, kind of what we're discussing here, you have success. It's easy to just forget about that and kind of just smile and pat each other in the back and go, okay, here we go. I think great programs who are very process oriented are always going to be critical of themselves and say, 'here's what we need to improve on.'"

Brian Borland  on the season opener and what he saw from the front seven in particular...

"I think that kind of turned out like I was hoping it would. I know we're a lot better team, kind of tried to say that. And I think our guys believe we're much improved in a lot of ways. And it was good to go out there and show that against somebody else. And I understand we're going to probably play stronger teams this year, starting with this week. But yet, you kind of wonder, sometimes, you think you're better and you have confidence that you are, but you gotta go out there and play. And so that was good from the standpoint of, we accomplished a lot of things that we wanted to. I thought we played up to our level, we wanted to be physical, I thought we were really physical upfront and tackled well, which I thought we tackled pretty well. So I think there's a lot of good positive things that we can take from that, but also understanding that the level of competition is going to get a lot stronger now. So we've got to keep matching that."

Borland on the importance of making West Virginia one-dimensional...

"[JT Daniels] can certainly throw the ball, so I don't know if that always seems wise or not, to invite him to throw the ball. But I think the same thing, if a team can run the ball on you then then they can run and throw on you. So we always kind of start with that and, and we want to be solid against the run. And if you can get a team into throwing situations where you really feel like you know, they're gonna have to throw that really works to your advantage. And he's a really good quarterback, you got a strong arm and he looks like he can make all the kinds of throws that guys need to make. And we're going to certainly have to be on point in all phases. But we want to continue the trend now that we really started last week was you can't allow a team just to run the ball successfully an you consistently. And if we can do that, I think that will open up the other the other avenues of our defense that allow us to be successful, hopefully in every way."

Borland on the test KU's defensive backs face in the West Virginia WR unit...

"We played against those same guys last year and I think, part of the way that Pitt plays their secondary kind of lends itself to some of the passes that you saw. But I also think they realize, 'Hey, maybe we were on to something here with some of those receivers.' And they are tall, and they can go get the ball. So if you throw those kinds of passes, he's either going to catch it, or it's going to be interference or probably could be incomplete. So they probably feel like their odds are pretty good, at least two of the three situations, something's going to happen. I guess we could intercept it, that would be that'd be two negatives and two positives. But I'm sure they feel probably pretty good about those odds when they do that. And we're certainly aware of that. I know, Coach Peterson has been, we've been working on a lot of those kinds of drills against those kinds of balls. So we're as prepared as we're going to be. I'm sure they're going to test us and hopefully, we're going to have our fair amount of success, but they're probably going to catch one, too. So we got to be able to put that behind us and it's the next play that's important. But we're going to do some things hopefully, that'll give our corners a little bit of help as well. So not make it quite so inviting for those guys to do that as many times as they might have done that the other night when they played."

Borland on  Lonnie Phelps...

"Yeah, it was awesome. He shows up, similarly, in practice a lot of times. But to go out there on the live stage and do that, he was kind of unblockable for them, which gives everybody else down the line now something to think about. Now we've got to get the complementary pieces to him so an offense can't just gear gear their protections and around one guy. We've got to get other guys to do similar things. And I think we have the potential to do that. But again, for him personally, that was awesome. We saw it from his days at Miami of Ohio. And from the time this spring and fall camp. That's just kind of the guy he is, so we just need more of the safe from him."

Borland on the number of players KU rotated in Week 1 and the total number of snaps...

"It was good. I think everybody's fresh. I don't know that anybody really played defensively we might have had a couple of guys hit 40 snaps but most guys played a lot in the 20s and 30s and some guys not even that much. So, I don't know if it's frustrating for players, I suppose it is because they want to play a lot more. But that's a good problem to have. Right? When you feel like 'Man we didn't get guys a lot of playing time.' That's probably good. So I think our rotation plan is going to be somewhat similar. But I think we also know that at certain times, you're going to want to have certain guys in there and in those clutch times and we'll we'll make sure that happens too."

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