Thank you to K-State Athletics communications for providing the following transcripts of Kansas State's coordinators in advance of Saturday's Sunflower Showdown.

On the talent of the Kansas’ skill positions…

“It’s similar to a lot of these games. You have a running back that can run, he can move, he’s got good ability, he can move around and do some of those things. So, it always starts there for us. How good is the run game and how many do we have to put in the box and stop it? This one’s a challenge. He’s a guy that, if you short it, he has the ability to hit a home run on you. So you have to pick and choose the times where you do short the run game and you play come cover two stuff. I think they’re good enough to hit home runs back there. Then they have a quarterback who can throw the ball and manage the game, and do all those things. They have enough speed on the outside to punish you if you consistently put too many guys in the box. So, it’s a balance and you try to show them the same thing play after play and do different things at them. Hopefully they have to guess, is what you’re making them. Then when they have to guess, hopefully they’re at least guessing wrong half the time.”

On the defense only giving up six third-quarter points against Oklahoma...

“We were excited about it. It think the guys were excited about that time. I think that just the fact that, going into the game, we knew they were a challenge. They’re a great offense. They have some really good players, man. It’s a deal that we said, ‘Listen, you have to make them punt a few times. You have to get a couple takeaways, and you have to make them kick field goals instead of touchdowns.’ During that stretch, I think we did a pretty good job with that. During the rest of them game, we didn’t. We did a better job tackling them than a TCU, which was a good thing, but, like you said, our guys believe, they scrap around and they try hard no matter what the situation is. So, hopefully we can keep getting that out of them.”

On allowing the very few pass touchdowns this season...

“I think we’ve just been worse against the run at this point, (that) would be my guess against that. I think that’s cool, and I think they are playing good pass defense. We had a chance to hit some guys last week and do all those things, but I think that we’re giving up some yards against the run, too. So, I think people, when they come in, they look at it the other way, ‘Hey, can we run the ball against these guys?’ We’ve been giving up some explosive plays there, especially with quarterbacks running around. Even if you look at what Oklahoma did - their running backs, after we started stopping them because we did focus on them quite a bit, we didn’t know that (Jalen) Hurts would carry the ball so many times. They just aborted the run game with running backs and started running him all the time. I think that some people choose to go that way. It just so happens when they get down there in the red zone, you can find different ways to get in, and that’s one of the ways. Hopefully we can keep them out of them end zone with passing, that’s a great deal.”

On defensive back AJ Parker…

“He’s been really good. He’s been our best corner. We try to give him the best matchup on most weeks. Sometimes we’ll play him field and boundary. Sometimes we’ll put him on a guy. We generally give him the hardest job that we have on defense, and he’s been holding up pretty good. I know that everybody’s going to give up a play here and there, but he has a great mentality that he’s got a short memory. When it does happen, he can go back in and play the next play. He understands it’s a six-second life. It really doesn’t matter if you gave up one or two already, you just have to go play, or if you made a great play or not because they’re still going to come after you. It’s kind of the position we’ve put him in, and he’s done a really good job with it.”

On how much experience he has facing offenses who are heavy with RPO...

“I think it’s been something that’s been sliding in and out a little bit here. They’ve tended to go at it the last couple weeks more with the transition that they’ve had. We tweak our defense a little bit as best we can. There’s some things that are good to it and other things that are less good to it. So, we try to keep ourselves away from the ones you’d say, ‘Ok, what kind of RPO game our they?’ We’ve been seeing RPO’s all year, a lot of it’s more outside-breaking stuff, so with what we do, it doesn’t really bother us. If they get into some other things where they’re going shots or whatever, and you know a lot of stuff nowadays is considered RPO but it’s also look. Your corner is way off, and you say, Ok, they're not going to give up the fade, but I’ve got a free five-yard hitch.’ Is it a true RPO where I’m reading a guy to throw or give, or is it a pre-snap thing. I think that they kind of do multiple. If they have a pre-snap key, ‘He’s way back there,’ or, ‘He’s up, let’s throw him the fade.’ After the snap, ‘Ok, we’re going to go bubble, so if you cheat this guy into far, Ok, we can throw it.’ So, those things you have to be able to tweak it. That’s the same that we started with - just try to give them the look where they’d say, ‘Ok, we think we’ve got it, one defense we’re going to take it away. The next defense, they’re going to have it.’ So, they have to be right at least pre-snap. We’re not going to try to show them too much.”

On how stressful it was trying to stop Oklahoma when the Sooners trying to come back...

“Oh man. Those are the things that you try to talk situational football with the guys and you say, ‘Hey, you either get scored on slowly (and) get the ball back, or make them kick field goals.’ That’s really the whole game plan, the whole day, and the first time we went out there after we talked about it, seven second. CeeDee Lamb is a pretty good player, man. But it was stressful. It was one of those things. Every game I think is stressful. Every game comes to that point where it’s a tipping point, and if the guys keep battling, it’s always fun, but I think all games have that point in it. Even the games you win by a lot, there’s that tipping point where you can go one way or another. You give up a big play, they’re back in it or not. That game was pretty good because you don’t want to let the offense down. They played a super game, (and) special teams did a good job too. They were balling.”

On how difficult the balance of K-State’s offense would be to stop...

“I don’t know. The hard part is I see nothing of that side of the ball. We’re worried about we’ve got a guy that’s going for like 500 yards between us throwing and running, so I don’t know. It sounded like, Mess (Courtney Messingham) said something that the stats were pretty balanced. I think that that’s hard. I think that it’s hard when you have a team that’s doing both to you. Really it sounded like, and I don’t know what it was, but when a team takes what you give them, that’s the hard part. Like we talked about, if the corner is way off and we had a fade or a hitch, and I can run ball into a whole bunch of guys in the box or I can just throw the hitch and you get five yards, well it’s still five yards. If offenses are patient like that and they’re willing to 20 plays, that’s really hard to defend. It’s the teams that get impatient, take a shot and it’s incomplete, then you get a chance as a defense to say, ‘Ok, now they’re off schedule,’ or it’s third and medium or long, ‘Ok, now maybe the odds go back in our favor a little bit. Those are hard things to defend.”

On who would replace the role on defense held by Eric Gallon II...

“(Khalid) Duke. We tried Duke out a little bit to rush too. I think Boom (Bronson Massie) is getting healthy. He was a guy that really had that slot going into the season. His hip has been bad and he’s been back and forth. Sometimes you go out to practice and he looks great, and other times he looks like me. Well, not quite as bad as me, but he looks like an old man running around out there. You hope that he can keep coming back and say, ‘Hey, if he keeps getting juiced up he’s a guy.’ He ended up finishing the game with us in that situation, which was good, but you’d always like to have (a guy) like E.G. (Eric Gallon), (who) had that special burst. You want to keep guys like that as much as you can on the field. I think that Duke’s a young guy that can really rush, can do some of those things and has that different speed level than some of the other guys we have out there.”

On Kansas’ pass offense…

“You look at some of their stuff and say, ‘Man, that was a really good throw and catch’. They have good chemistry between outside receivers, really all their receivers, even their inside guys. He throws a nice outside deep ball that they can run underneath. Then, they also have enough athletes that it’s a deal where you can say, ‘Ok, hey, I’ve got an over route that I can kind of lean.’ If you jump it wrong or the safety misses it, a lot of times it’s hitting at that level where it’s behind the linebackers so you have less ability to play it with your underneath guys, but if a deep guy misses it, now it’s big. I think that they do a great job with both of those things. They can put touch on the ball, he does a good job putting it out there for the guys to run underneath, and it’s a deal where they’re catching that second level route where, hey, if we don’t do a sure job tackling in the back end, it could spit out on you. It goes from a 16-yard completion to a 31 because one guy missed and it’s just at that range.”

On Skylar Thompson being named Maxwell Award Player of the Week…

“(It was) well deserved. Obviously, it happened because of how well he played last week, but he’s put a lot of time and effort in all season long. I was very excited and happy for him.”

On factors for the offensive performance against Oklahoma…

“Players executing. Players making plays. Huge plays on third down conversions by, Skylar (Thompson) throwing it well, but also guys making catches, protecting and, really, 11 guys being all on the same page. If it was Dalton (Schoen) making a great catch or if it was Jordon Brown going down the sideline and Skylar finding him for a big first down, it was really players executing and guys believing in each other.”

On what impressed him most with Skylar Thompson’s performance against Oklahoma…

“I think it would be his ability to understand what we were trying to get done. He ran the ball extremely well from the quarterback position but, obviously, he threw it really well also, and (he) was able to handle the roller coaster emotional ride of a big game like that.”

On Jordon Brown’s performance against OU…

“I thought he played really, really well, both in running the football as well as going out and being a receiver type of guy as well. It’s tough sometimes from a pass protection standpoint when you’re not in there for a few weeks, and he didn’t miss a beat in terms of he knew his assignments, which was a positive as well.”

On opening up the quarterback run game…

“I think it makes a big difference because defenses, obviously, then have to account for 11 guys rather than just 10 because of handing it off. The more he can be involved, but yet be smart, the better it’s going to be for us because he’s a tailback. You don’t want him getting hit like a tailback, but yet you want them to have to defend him.”

On how much Jordon Brown opens up the playbook…

“Quite a bit. It allows us, really, to force people to defend all the things he brings to the table. Not every tailback has the skill set that he has.”

On the length of Kansas’ defensive linemen…

“It’s a concern because they have three D-linemen that I would consider to be true D-linemen, and then a fourth guy that rushes the passer a bunch as one of their outside linebackers. They do a good job putting pressure. They’re big and long, and they run well, especially their outside backers. They run really, really well.”

On the importance of the run game against Kansas…

“It’s a new week, and every week for us, we’re going to try to hang our hat on running the football first. What KU has done in the past compared to what they’re going to do Saturday is yet to be seen, obviously. What we keep trying to preach to our players is, ‘Each week is a new week. You better be ready to play and execute at a high level.’”

On preparation this week…

“I feel like we’ve prepared well. The biggest thing that we tried to talk (about) on Monday is, ‘Ok, that one is over. Get ready and prepare for the next one.’ I think they’ve done a nice job.”

On if he could sense a big game from the offense against OU during the week of prep…

“You always feel like you’re doing well, but that’s the unfortunate part - you get done with a Thursday and then a Friday, and you feel good about your plan, but then you still have to go out and execute the plan. Until that thing starts rolling, you don’t really know how it’s going to happen. Unfortunately, we went three and out to start that game, but then after that, (we) had a number of series in a row when we put points on the board. That’s what we’re looking to try to do this week as well.”

On being a part of a new rivalry…

“It is kind of cool. I’ve been a number of places now where the state game is the huge rivalry game. (It’s) no different than the other places I’ve been. It’s for bragging rights, and you have to keep your guys grounded and focused on the task at hand. Last year’s game or the year before that has nothing to do with this game. I’m sure it will be a battle until the end.”

On the status of wide receiver Malik Knowles...

“I think Malik has been fortunately been able to continue to play and not hurt himself more. He is, actually, I believe getting stronger and better, and we need him to.”

On offensive line misdirection…

“Most of the time on that aspect, it’s more what gives us an advantage. We pulled some people last week that maybe we haven’t pulled as much in the past. Part of it’s just the style of defense that people playing against you. We need to have our O-linemen be able to knock people off the ball in a ‘zone scheme’ where there’s not a lot of pulling going on, but we need to down block and pull people as well.”

On neutralizing Oklahoma linebacker Kenneth Murray…

“We knew he was an extremely good player, obviously. It doesn’t take much film to watch and see, even if you’re just watching a TV game, how active he is. Our bigger deal was whoever got the opportunity to block at the point of the attack - if it was a tight end, a fullback or the O-linemen - we needed to do our job and get it started. If we could get that point of attack taken care of, now we have a chance. That hat was a big key because we had a few, but not a lot, of negative-yard running plays. That’s what we need to keep making sure we’re doing is having positive (gains), even if it’s only two yards. We can’t have minus-four.”

On the challenge of facing Kansas’ defensive line…

“When you go look at how long they are - and they’re not small, they’re tall and thick - and they run really, really well. That’s something that we have to do a great job of, of really manning up and matching up well, winning one-on-one battles because they’re going to put you in one-on-one battles with the tackles and the their D-ends.”

On wide receiver Dalton Schoen…

“He does a great job of making plays when it’s in front of him. I wouldn’t say he is Skylar’s (Thompson) security blanket, but I know they feel very, very comfortable with each other. He has to keep doing that. He’s an older guy that has been through a lot of battles. He needs to keep making great plays for us, and I anticipate that he will.”