Brian Borland previews the Oklahoma game

Kansas defensive coordinator Brian Borland previews the Oklahoma game and what they have to do against the Oklahoma offense. He talked about using a spy on Gabriel and being sound in their assignments.

One of the hot topics in college football and the situation at Michigan, is stealing signals. The Kansas staff has changed some of their signals because one of their grad assistants who used to help signal in the plays is now on Oklahoma’s sidelines.

“We’ve kind of got a unique situation this year because our (old) defensive signaler is on the Oklahoma staff this year from the last two years,” Borland said. “So, we've changed all of our signals and we've shortened a bunch of them. In a huddling situation, we might have some calls that might have four or five words to them.”

Borland talked about facing the Oklahoma offense and much more. Here are a few key topics the Jayhawks defensive coordinator touched on.

How important was it for the defensive line to get a bye week since some of them were dealing with various injuries…

I think it was good. Got most of those guys or all of those guys back practicing regularly. So hopefully we're going into the game probably as healthy as we've been in a number of weeks in that area. So, it's helpful but yeah, at the same time they've been still getting some work but you're able to limit guys a little bit at various points so they're not getting overworked.

How do you defend Gabriel who is a mobile quarterback and can run well…

He's a really good scrambler. So, I think some of his runs might have been a long draw, like a draw that he ran a long ways. Otherwise, he's got a good feel for the pocket. He got a good feel for where to step up and how to step up. And he's avoided some guys that come pretty clean and rush. Sometimes he's able to spin out and avoid some things. It's probably more of that than just the design runs where he's going to keep it on a running play. Although there's a little bit of that as well. But we got to be sound in our rush lanes. We can't get unbalanced, and we know that we got to kind of just keep lanes and kind of try to keep guys corralled.

Obviously, there are certain calls where we can have whatever you call him a spy or whatever. There might be certain calls that we have that you can kind of add another layer to things if he does in fact step up. At the end of the day, again, he's a good player and sometimes you can do all the things that you want to do and good players are still going to find a way to make some things happen. So once in a while you’ve got to live with that to a certain extent. But obviously we know we’ve got to really be sound in what we're trying to do versus him because he's played a ton of football and he's a really good player, so he'll make you pay if you don't.

Borland talks about their up-tempo style of offense, their offensive line and much more in his weekly press conference below.