THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
FRIDAY,OCTOBER 28,2011
PAGE 7
FOOTBALL BIG 12 PRESENTED BY PREVIEW WAVE
ETHAN PADWAY
epadway@kansan.com
Robert Griffin III leads a Baylor team that is falling in the Big 12 standings. He and the Bears head up to Stillwater to try to upset new conference frontrunner Oklahoma State. Griffin was a leader in the Heisman race until his team started to falter down the stretch. The Bears' offense has been solid but the defense has allowed more than 30 points four times this season. They will have a tough time trying to contain Brandon Weeden and the Cowboys' second-ranked scoring offense.
Prediction: 52-35 Oklahoma State
ESPN College Gameday had its sights set on Manhattan until Texas Tech came into Norman, Okla., and took down the Sooners. Kansas State remains undefeated, facing its biggest test of the season. Despite their spotless record, the Wildcats still enter Saturday's game as underdogs. A victory for the Wildcats would establish them as true contenders for the BCS title game. Wildcat quarterback Collin Klein has had his way with opposing defenses, rushing for 14 touchdowns and throwing for 14 more, but he faces one of the strongest defenses in the nation against the Sooners. If the Wildcats want to pull the upset, Klein will have to take as much time off the clock while the Wildcats have the ball, wearing down the Sooners' defense and keeping Landry Jones off the field.
Prediction: 31-24 Oklahoma
Iowa State enters Lubbock, Texas in an all-out free fall, losing four consecutive games since entering Big 12 play. Things don't look to get much better for the Cyclones this weekend, as they get a Red Raiders team hot off its upset victory over the then-undefeated Oklahoma Sooners. Iowa State's defense will face a challenge trying to keep Seth Doege and the Red Raiders' third-ranked offense in check. Doege had one of his best games of the season against the Sooners, throwing for 441 yards and five touchdowns.
Prediction: 49-20 Texas Tech
James Franklin takes the Tiger offense to College Station, Texas in a game that soon might be contested regularly in the Southeastern Conference. The Tigers have had success against micropoeons opponents but have yet to prove themselves against a team with a winning record from a BCS conference. They will have a tough task slowing down the Aggie offense, ranked in the top 20 of the nation in passing, rushing, and scoring. A victory for the Tigers would rejuvenate their spirits, while a win for the Aggies would keep them relevant in the Big 12 title hunt.
Prediction: 38-24 Texas A&M
CROSS COUNTRY
Team prepares for Texas meet
MAX GOODWIN
mgoodwin@kansan.com
The men's cross country team will face some tough competition this weekend at the Big 12 Championship meet. The Jayhawks will face two-time defending national champions Oklahoma State, as well as Texas, which has one of the nation's top programs, according to Kansas cross country runner Austin Bussing.
Bussing said that he is not putting those teams out of reach for this Saturday's Big 12 Championship meet. If any of them have a bad day in College Station, Texas, then the Jayhawks will be ready to take advantage. It is important for the Jayhawks to beat solid teams like Oklahoma, Texas A&M, and Iowa State to improve their resume for the national meet.
The Kansas men's team is an older group with experience and an obvious strength. They have a depth of talented runners from Bussing, down to the fifth and sixth runners like freshman Reid Buchanan and sophomore Josh Munsch. Bussing is a captain on the team, but he said there are other leaders as well.
"Zach Zarda's been real influential and James Wilson. I always describe him as the spark plug, he's the tough guy who gets everybody excited," Bussing said.
It's the natural progression of the season for cross country runners to increase speed and decrease race times as they continue to gain strength throughout the season. For the Jayhawks, every runner has made big improvements in running time. Bussing finished as the team's top runner for the first time at the Adidas Invitational in Wisconsin.
"I think coach Whittlesey has done an excellent job with not just Austin but the whole team. They continue to improve under his guidance and it's just that time of year where they're starting to run faster now and he has them prepared and ready to go," coach Stanley Redwine said.
Freshman runner James Wilson has finished in every spot between first and fourth this season, demonstrating just how close this team is in the times of its races.
Commitment to the team has been a point of emphasis all year for the Jayhawks. There always comes a time in the race when a runner starts to feel physical pain, it would be easy to just slow down the runner's pace and coast through the finish line, but Bussing said that when he gets that feeling he thinks of his teammates. He sees them and thinks that if he were to slow down it would hurt his entire team in the standings. When he sees a teammate give a kick and speed up he knows that he has to go with them.
"It helps that we are a pretty deep team, from our first guy to our fifth guy we've only got a twenty second gap, so most of the race we're running together and it helps that I've got my teammates right there pushing me just like I do in practice." Wilson said.
"It's not only having faith and confidence in yourself but having faith and confidence in the team and realizing that you have a responsibility to the team." Bussing said.
Edited by Josh Kantor
MIKE GUNNOF/KANSAN FILF PHOTO
The men's cross country team will race against Oklahoma State, the defending national champions. The Jayhawks run with experience and strength.
SAFETY
Colleges across the country have tightened their use of aerial lifts — or outright eliminated them — a year after a University of Notre Dame student was killed when wind gusts toppled the lift where he was filming football practice.
Universities review policies on lift use by videographers
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Some officials worry that the dangers persist, though, because there's no universal requirement for how schools should use the structures that were intended for construction sites, not practice fields.
"We've got to get rid of these things," said David Hougland, director of sports broadcasting at Texas Tech. "No one should ever die or be injured from falling from one of these."
Twenty-year-old Declan Sullivan was filming practice on Oct. 27, 2010, when winds of up to 53 mph blew over the lift he was on. After a nearly six-month investigation, university officials acknowledged that their procedures and safeguards were not adequate and paid a $42,000 fine to the state for safety violations. Notre Dame's investigation also found that many schools nationwide did not have specific safety protocols in place for aerial lifts.
Since then, dozens of colleges have changed their policies, from handing out copies of the lift guidelines to all videographers to specifying the wind speeds at which the lifts won't be used. Some schools, including Notre Dame, have stopped using them.
The most high-profile change has occurred at the University of Florida, which installed six permanent towers at a cost of $650,000 so it could curtail its use of aerial lifts. Chip Howard, an associate athletic director, said the school began reviewing how it uses aerial lifts immediately after Sullivan's death.
"All of us nationally kind of took a step back and evaluated what we were doing," Arkansas State athletic director Dean Lee said.
"When that happened we got our video staff together and discussed, 'Hey, how do we do things? How do our guys feel when they go up? How high do our lifts go up?' he said.
The university found that while videographers were given equipment to monitor the wind — a practice Notre Dame lacked — there wasn't a written policy outlining the wind speeds at which the lifts wouldn't be used. Howard said Florida has adopted a written policy prohibiting their use when the wind is gusting 28 mph or more.
Florida then decided its best long-term solution was to install the permanent 41-foot-high towers with lightning rods. The school still occasionally uses lifts, but the need for them is greatly reduced, Howard said.
Notre Dame stopped using lifts to film practice after installing remote-controlled cameras on its practice field in the spring. Arkansas State took down a 30-year-old tower that used telephone poles as its base because of safety concerns and replaced it with a 51-foot-high steel tower.
Tulane, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas Tech also revised their aerial lift policies. Tulane's now specifies to what heights the two types of lifts it uses can be extended under certain wind conditions, and says the aerial lifts may not be used when gusts reach 25 mph or greater. It also specifies that weather conditions should be checked less than an hour before practice begins and that each lift be equipped with a wind meter.
Lori Williams, associate athletic director at the University of Kansas, said one of the biggest challenges as the school reviewed its policy was seeing how it compared with other schools.
"What we found is that there isn't one centralized location that said, 'OK, this is exactly what you should do.' It leaves a lot of flexibility to the institutions," she said.
Texas Tech already had some of the nation's strictest rules among universities on aerial lifts. It allows videographers to lower lifts if they have safety concerns, requires athletic department staff to monitor weather conditions to ensure the videographer's safety and limits the heights to which lifts can be raised to 20 feet in gusts of 20 mph or more. If winds hit 40 mph, the lifts are banned.
Texas Tech had updated its policy just six weeks before Sullivan's death to require that videographers carry hand-held wind meters. It was revised again afterward, requiring all videographers to be certified to use the lifts and requiring daily inspections of the devices. The updated policy was given to all videographers instead of just being posted on a wall, Hougland said. He said Texas Tech hopes to eventually move away from using aerial lifts.
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