Kansas defensive coordinator Brian Borland used the offseason to go back over the defense and look over detail he could find to improve going into spring football.
Borland said he looked at everything from how the team does their meetings to how they practice.
He is hoping to see improvement from a defense he believes improved from 2021 to 2022.
“We have to be honest with ourselves.” Borland said. “I think there has been improvement defensively from year one to year two in about every area. I don't think to the level of improvement that anybody's satisfied with. And that's, some of that is, players, its coaches, its scheme, it's process. There's all those things.”
Borland has studied his defense from top to bottom. He watched film and met with staff. He has looked over the statistics but does not always use them as a metric.
“We've really looked hard at all of those areas, and I try not to just look at statistics all the time,” he said. “I think statistics can lie just as much as anything else. I know that we're a better defense than we were a year ago. It doesn't always show up like you want it to in rankings and things like that. But I say all that knowing that we've got to make more progress.”
But stats do show improvement from 2021 to 2022.
The defense gave up less yards per game. They held their opponents to one less touchdown a game compared to 2021. They went from last in the league in sacks to sixth.
They finished the season ranked 25th in nation in creating turnovers. That is up 58 spots from the previous season.
“We need to keep improving,” Borland said. “We are looking at everything. Could be our meeting structure. Some things that we haven't done in practice that we really feel like we need to do now more of. Maybe it is moving players around a little bit to get guys where they really got a chance to help us the most. And so just things like that. Maybe it's within what we're doing.”
When he was the coordinator for Lance Leipold the 4-3 defense at Buffalo had success. In 2019 Borland led one of the best defenses in school history. The following season they led the MAC in total defense.
Borland wants to see incremental improvement from 2022 and he believes in the system.
“I know the defense that we're running works,” he said. “I know it does. There's nothing wrong with it. But saying that, there may be little things that we have done or not done in the past schematically that if we just tweak this little thing right here, this will really help us. And that's all based on what we saw from the fall. So, we've done all those things. Again, I’m really anxious to get going here and see if we're not a little bit different this spring.”
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