Gameday Thread: Baylor (3-3) faces Kansas (5-2) for Homecoming

The Baylor Bears (3-3) are back home to face Kansas (5-2) in a Homecoming game at McLane Stadium. Kickoff is scheduled for 11:00 A.m. CT and will be aired live on ESPN2.

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Quotes of the Week

Junior Defensive Lineman Apu Ika

"I feel like, we just got to play faster, get back to playing green, playing like us. I feel like during practice — when the lights aren't on and pressure isn't built — it's easy to play fast and say this and that. But we just got to do it when the lights turn on.”

Senior Tight End Ben Sims

“It goes back to doing simple better, being more intentional in our practices. Like taking everything seriously, because the things that you do in practice show up in the game. So like really going back and looking at you know, practice tape, it turns out that you do the exact same thing in the game. So, just the intentionality of what we're doing every day.”

Head Coach Dave Aranda

"I think we've probably had some games this year, unfortunately — and none of us ever talked this way — where I think we showed up thinking we're just gonna win this game. You know, here we are, where's the championship belt? And that was something that's never been a core belief or a core anything with anything we do," Aranda openly shared on Monday. 

Analysis of the Week

SicEm365 Analyst Travis Roeder

The biggest area Kansas beats you is with chunk plays in the throw game. They are secondnationally in Expected Points Added (EPA) per throw. You don’t need to be a statistics savant to intuit what that probably means.

The briefest summary possible of EPA: It’s a context-considered estimate of how many points the offense added [expected] per play. A 45-yard pass on 1st & 10 from your own 25 is worth somewhere around 4 points. A 6-yard pass on 3rd & 4 from your own 25 is going to be worth positive points, but a 6-yard pass on 3rd & 10 from your own 25 is going to be negative. That’s how the context comes into play.

So, Kansas is second nationally in EPA per throw. That means they’re hitting a ton of big plays at a very efficient rate. EPA can sometimes be misleading (especially with option teams, they rarely throw and when they do they usually go for big plays) but Kansas is throwing the ball quite a bit and is still hitting a bunch of huge plays. Of course, most of this was still with Jalon Daniels at the helm, but Bean has shown that he’s more than adequate at launching the ball downfield.