Last season, NIU football was nine seconds away from defeating the Kansas Jayhawks in their home territory.

That game could provide some motivation for the NIU (2-1) players on the roster that lived through the 45-42 defeat at the hands of Kansas (1-2).

“We played poorly,” said coach Dave Doeren in a press conference. “We couldn’t get off the field on third down. We missed a bunch of sacks in that game. I think any time you lose and get to play that team again, you probably have that chip on your shoulder that you want to make things better.

“I haven’t had that conversation with anybody, but I know this is a game that our players wish they could’ve played again last year.”

This year is a new year, with fresh faces on both sides of the ball. What could factor in more largely than the new faces will be the familiar faces for the Huskies defense.

Doeren believes the amount of time the Huskies had together last season was not enough to be competitive with a program like Kansas.

“The players know that our details weren’t good enough in that game last year,” Doeren said in a news conference. “I think there’s a lot of things, when you get to that game if you go back in time, on how it went down. We were a young, young team on defense. We had only played one game, and that game was against Army. So, we hadn’t really played a game against another team yet.”

For Kansas on defense, coach Charlie Weis believes his players’s attention to detail can decide the success of both their ability to defend and how NIU can execute offensively.

“Offensively, before you even talk about their quarterback, which is a great place to start, [you have to know that] they shift in motion on almost every play,” Weis said in a news conference. “You have to make sure that you get lined up right, or else they cause a lot of problems for you.”

For NIU defensively, the mantra has become takeaways. The Huskies have not been able to find many of them this season, and senior linebacker Tyrone Clark said it’s not for a lack of coaching or effort, but there may be a variable missing.

“We go through a tackling circuit and a turnover circuit,” Clark said in a news conference. “We do a good job in practice, we just have to relay it to the game. If anything, it’s just more about attempts—attempts at stripping the ball out.”

Looking past all the match-ups and intricacies that are involved in a football game, there are a few other factors riding on this game. Not only will this match-up provide an expected packed house, but it also will be NIU’s final tune up opportunity before MAC play.

“I don’t know if I can do a rallying cry for the student body to show up, but I would love to do that,” Doeren said in a news conference. “Those guys make us better, our fans. We have a 16-game home winning streak we are defending this week and [we] get to do it against a Big 12 football team. So I think it’s a great opportunity for people to see a really good game here.”