What’s the goal for Kansas football’s defense? Make other teams ‘quit trying to run’
Kansas defensive coordinator Brian Borland doesn’t like to take too much credit for KU’s drastic turnaround on the defensive end in 2023.
After allowing 35.5 points and 469.3 yards per game in 2022 — both ranking dead last in Big 12 — the Jayhawks made significant strides in 2023. KU’s defense allowed 25.8 points and 377.6 yards per game.
It’s a big reason why the Jayhawks went 9-4 last season.
Still, Borland isn’t worried about who gets credit for the improvement — he’s just focused on taking the defense to another level this season.
“I’d like to think it’s great coaching,” Borland joked. “Obviously our players (have) one more year of experience and one more year of really preaching the same message. Trying to do a lot of the same things, just improving that way.”
Still, Borland believes the Jayhawks’ defense has a ways to go. In fact, he has three specific areas in which he hopes KU will take another step forward.
The first one is improving KU’s run defense. The Jayhawks allowed 167.1 yards per game on the ground last season.
“I think, if you’re asking me, I want to be a defense where teams — they almost quit trying to run the ball on you because they can’t,” he said. “We did have a couple of games like that last year, which is refreshing. It takes me back to some of the former years and former places. But we weren’t that way all the time.”
The second area of focus is improving KU’s red zone defense.
“I don’t know that we stopped anybody from scoring when they got inside the 20 last year, whether it was kicking a field goal or scoring a touchdown,” Borland said. “We’ve already addressed those things and talked about things. And we track them when we get red zone periods in practice.
“We want to get turnovers, we want to get stops, we want to force field goals. And the last of the four results is touchdowns. So really, it’s no touchdowns. But we’ve got to do a better job in that area. Again, we couldn’t be any worse than we were.”
Kansas safety Marvin Grant believes the improvement starts with the defense’s overall mindset.
“The biggest key is just having that will for real — if you have that will to deny the teams to not get in there … it’s a mindset,” Grant said. “Once you’ve got the mindset of not letting teams in, then that’s when everything else starts to follow.”
The last area of improvement: getting better on important downs.
“Our third-and-long, third-and-medium kind of defenses where we want to stop people at a higher percentage and really put ourselves in fourth down, get off the field situations,” Borland said. “And I think we were, again, not strong enough in those areas.”
If the Jayhawks can improve in those three areas, it’ll help them reach the lofty expectations they’ve set for themselves.
“We here to win,” Grant said. “We here to win the championship. That’s the most important thing.”
This story was originally published August 3, 2024 at 6:00 AM with the headline "What’s the goal for Kansas football’s defense? Make other teams ‘quit trying to run’."
