JayhawkSlant.com - Kansas Football Notebook

September 4, 2012

Bryan Cisler

The players received their first grades of the year for the South Dakota State game this week. While nobody would go into specifics on who graded the highest, Weis did explain the method to his game evaluations. The players will receive pluses and minuses in the run game and passing game that add up to a percentage grade.

"I'll grade harder than a lot of the position coaches, so every once in awhile, I'll look at somebody's grade and I'll say, `Man I wish I would've had you when I was in class.'" Weis said. "I think it's easier when you're sitting down there. When you have the clicker in your hand, it's easy to nit-pick because you could see every little thing. When you just have to tell with the naked eye, sometimes you don't see all the detail especially the last of attention to detail."

Of course, everyone wanted to see what was on Dayne Crist's report card. Weis joked that he gave the quarterback a grade that his parents would not have been happy with if he had brought it home.

Still, the coach said he was overall pleased with Crist's demeanor during the game. Before last Saturday, Weis wondered if Crist would be nervous because it had been so long since he had seen game action.

"It's been a long time since he played," Weis said. "Is he going to be looking at the rush? And with both those questions, he wasn't scared and he wasn't looking at the rush. If things don't go great, is he going to be composed? So he had the trifecta with me. Really, the three most important things that I was looking at going into this year, to see how successful he would be would be those three. And with those three, he came through with flying colors."

Previewing Rice's Defensive Line

The Kansas offensive will face a bigger challenge this week in Rice. Last week Kansas had to deal with a smaller defensive line with South Dakota State that constantly switched between a 3-4 and a 4-3. Rice for the most part stays with the 4-2-5 package, and will occasionally move into three down linemen on third down situations.

"They don't throw a heck of a lot on defense but they are good at what they do," tight ends coach Jeff Blasko said.

Rice's best player on their line is defensive end Jared Williams. He will likely be matched up against Tanner Hawkinson in what will be one of the more entertaining matchups of the game.

"[Williams] is a top notch football player," Grunhard said. "He is a good pass rusher and has good strength. He does not allow you to capture the edge on your outside runs. He is a guy we are going to have to account for and make sure we know where he is at at all times."

In last week's game against UCLA, Rice gave up 343 rushing hards, but Weis says the numbers don't tell the whole story. He said the numbers were skewed by several long runs by UCLA.

"I think you have to look at the whole body of evidence," Weis said. "You can look at the fact that I'm sure they felt bad that they gave up big plays, but they also made a whole bunch of plays too, so I don't think you can just count on the fact, `Well yeah, we're going to get Tony (Pierson) in the open field like that.' Hey, sign me up if you think that's what's going to end up happening, but I think we're going to have to make sure we play physical up front to be able to get that to happen."

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