There are at least two reasons why No. 21 Oklahoma State should be motivated to play Kansas Saturday.

First, the Cowboys lost their conference opener to Texas Tech, 17-41, last Saturday and that was a critical home game.

And secondly, Kansas has already won twice as many games as they did last year.

Actually, the Jayhawks went 1-11 last season but they have rebounded with a 2-2 this season, including an impressive win over Rutgers of the Big Ten.

Last year, OSU clobbered Kansas 58-17 in Stillwater. This will be the first game away from home and that could be a cause for concern.

What happened against Texas Tech?

“I thought that their gameplan was better than ours in all three phases, and they executed it really well,” OSU coach Mike Gundy said Monday. “Then we got out of place in the middle or late-third quarter when we couldn’t function on offense, turned the ball over and then it just kind of snowballed late.”

OSU running back Justice Hill had 111 yards rushing on 12 carries and he scored a rushing touchdown.

“I felt like we were prepared and that we had a great week of practice, like Coach Gundy said. We had a great gameplan coming in, but we just didn’t execute our plays.” Hill would have had more rushing attempts but the Cowboys were behind and had to pass to try to catch up.

“We got behind, and that didn’t help,” Gundy said. “If we were able to go back and do it again, you’d like to have pumped it to him about 18 times in that game. When you get behind late in the third quarter, you’ve got to start saving a little clock. I sure would like to have him touch it a few more times.”

The Oklahoma State run game needs to get better and Gundy said it will.

“It’s not frustrating,” Gundy said. “It’s part of coaching, it’s what we do. If they were all 4.0 students and All-Americans then we wouldn’t have coaches. It’s not frustrating. We know what has to happen. We just try to continue to work to get a little better each day and they will. They will get better. We’ve got a couple guys, that for the most part, it’s new to them. Sometimes that shows up, but I think they will get better.”

Texas Tech had a complicated defensive plan.

“They didn’t even it out,” Gundy said. “They either blitzed everybody or they played eight-man drop, and when that happens, if they bring them all, you’re going to get hit some. If they bring them all and you hit the cutback, you’re going to hit them. Then if they play eight-man drop, you should get some decent runs. They brought heavy pressure or they played drop. They didn’t really play in the middle … pretty good concept really, on their part.”

OSU quarterback Taylor Cornelius didn’t have his best game against Texas Tech but one of the problems was a lack of protection from the offensive line.

“He missed a couple (throws), but there were a lot of times we didn’t do a good job of keeping our head up, got run through a couple times, they flushed him out of the pocket,” Gundy said Saturday. “And I think he got into a mode where his biological clock was moving real fast. Not necessarily panicked but as a quarterback, when you start to work faster than you need to based on pressure and things, sometimes it can work against you.”

“It seemed like everything that could go wrong, went wrong at particular times,” said OSU offensive coordinator Mike Yurcich. “Which disrupts your timing and flow and ability to move the ball down the field and score points.

“I thought Corn (Taylor Cornelius) played tough. I know the statistics don’t resemble it very well. I don’t think it’s all about numbers. We’ll have to go back and look at the film and see where mistakes were made at that position and correct them.”

Gundy said problems with the line can be fixed.

“We’ll be coaching them,” Gundy said Monday. “We coached them yesterday, we will be coaching them tomorrow and every day. That’s just what we do. I wish we had a lot more practices before the next game. You take little baby steps, you can’t go out there and practice for three hours. You try to get a little better in each stage and minimize the missed assignments. There were some things that they did better in this game than we had done, but some of the mistakes they made forced some negative yardage plays. That’s where it pushed us to a jam offensively.”

Kickoff for the game in Lawrence, Kansas, 11 a.m. and the game will be televised on FSN.

Saturday’s game is the 69th meeting between Oklahoma State and Kansas. OSU has a 37-29-2 all-time advantage in the series and a 21-15-1 advantage in Lawrence.

The Cowboys have won eight consecutive meetings, and a win Saturday would tie OSU’s longest active win streak against a single opponent, matching the current nine-win streak vs. Louisiana. OSU has also won 13 of the past 14 overall games vs. KU and seven straight games played in Lawrence.

OSU has not lost to KU since 2007, and it has not lost to KU in Lawrence since 1994.