K-State's Loss Begins Week 4 Trend for Big 12

The Ryder Cup at Valhalla was the reason your television set featured Kansas State at Louisville last night. The Vikings swarmed into town, took all the hotel rooms, and pretty soon K-State discovered they'd all been booked. Therefore, your rare Wednesday night game of lightweight-to-interesting football circumstance, the Head-Cats versus the Cards.

If you missed it and want to see something positive that K-State did, let's just get you off to the misleading start you deserve: A fantastic punt return by K-State's Deon Murphy, featuring not one but two death-defying cutbacks that, if they had not worked, would have earned him vomit-inducing gassers with certainty.
Fortunately for Deon, Louisville decided good tackling was too strenuous to "waste" on special teams. Unfortunately, K-State's defense noticed this, liked what they saw, and decided to follow suit, allowing Louisville to run for a ghastly 303 yards on the night, helping the Cards polish off a 38-29 win with ease. Thus continues the common understanding that if it says Ron Prince Football, it means maddeningly inconsistent football.

Your trendspotting tip of the day: with the first significant non-conference slate rolling through the conference, look for middling results in those games to temper the current mania for Big 12 futures. Colorado has West Virginia, Baylor plays UConn, and Miami plays the Aggies in College Station. Dan Hawkins will surely be ripping phone books in half and hosting motivational walks across burning coals in an attempt to get his linebackers to catch Pat White. (There aren't enough phone books in the known universe to make this happen, but he'll try.)

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.