Mistakes, injuries again plague KU
By JOE CHILDS Assistant Sports Editor
On Oct. 25, sophomore Phil Basler started his first game at quarterback against Iowa State. He was replacing Jim Ettinger who had been injured the week before against Nebraska. When the lanky lefthander assumed the starting role against the Cyclones KU was 1-4 and had just lost two close contests to K-State and the Cornhuskers. Optimism in Lawrence was sparse. Maybe Basler could give the Jayhawks what they needed.
Last Saturday, after the 31-15 loss to Oklahoma, a dejected Bassat sat beside his locker and said for probably the umplest millionth time. "We are a better team than we show."
"It's been that way all year," he went on. "We're inconsistent. We can't seem to put everything together at once. We did it one time today, on that drive for the first touchdown. We didn't do anything different. We just did everything right. But after that we got a couple of bad breaks and—I dunno—things just went wrong."
The bad breaks the young quarterback spoke of were injuries to three key KU defensive players. And with three starting members from the defensive unit out, how does a team stop a powerful offensive machine likeOU?
The answer is simple . . . You don't stop them and coach Pepper Rodgers knows it as well as anyone. With his shoes off, Pepper leaned back and summed up the game: "It wasn't a bad effort by a beat-up football team. The score at the half (15-14, KU) looked good to us, but in the
second half we had three players out from a 42-man squad. That was the key."
"They were down," Pepper continued. "We didn't have enough depth to compete with them. We lost Hicks, Bailey and Cooper on that drive."
Breaks go wrong way
But those are the breaks, and in a season a team can expect their share of bad ones. In this light, KU's 1969 season isn't so hard to bear. It is reassuring to think that Pepper and his crew have suffered enough bad breaks this season for at least two and maybe three years. But bad breaks and all it would have been nice to upset the Sooners and add a pinch of respectability to eight weeks of mishap.
Nov. 17
1969 KANSAN 9
But just as you can't blame LBJ alone for the war in Vietnam you can't blame OU's win only on bad breaks. "We just started making mistakes," reflected Emery Hicks, middle linebacker and an Oklahoma native. "They were as tired as we were, but we'd make a mistake or blow an assignment on third-and-four or when it was crucial."
Comparing this year's Sooner team to the squad that last season shared the conference title
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