K-State opens with 45-6 win over North Texas

    Kansas State coach Ron Prince stomped along the sideline, scowling, pointing, screaming at his players.
    Didn’t matter that his team was up by six touchdowns, against a small-conference team with one of the nation’s worst defenses a year ago. Thirteen months since his team’s last victory, Prince wanted a win. Really bad.
    Josh Freeman made sure he got it, throwing two of his three touchdown passes to Brandon Banks and running for two more scores to help Kansas State win another easy home opener Saturday night, 45-6 over North Texas.
    “It’s been a long time since we’ve won a game,” Prince said. “I was very anxious to have a chance to win a game and have a good season.”
    Kansas State started strong last season, then ended it with a four-game losing streak, finishing 5-7. Motivated to end the streak, the Wildcats overpowered North Texas on both sides of the ball, scoring on six of their first seven possessions to take a 42-0 lead, holding the Mean Green to 205 total yards — 81 in the first half.
    Freeman was quietly efficient to open his third season as Kansas State’s starter, connecting with Banks on a 30-yard touchdown in the second quarter, then on a 43-yarder to put the Wildcats up 35-0 less than a minute into the second half.
    Freeman also hit Lamark Brown on 6-yard touchdown pass late in the second quarter, finishing 18-for-24 for 232 yards to pass Chad May and Carl Straw for second on Kansas State’s all-time passing list (5,365). He scored on a 1-yard run in the first quarter and on an 8-yarder midway through the third.
    “It definitely feels good,” Freeman said. “There was excitement out there. Our boys came to play today.”
    It wasn’t too much of a surprise, though; the Wildcats have a habit of routing teams from smaller conferences, especially in home openers.
    Kansas State is 50-3 at home in non-conference since 1990, just four of those games against schools from BCS conferences. The Wildcats also have won 14 straight home openers, none against BCS teams.
    North Texas found itself in familiar territory as well, opening the season with a lopsided loss to a Big 12 school for the fourth time in five seasons. The Mean Green lost 79-10 to Oklahoma last year, 56-7 to Texas the year before and 65-0 to the Longhorns in 2004.
    This was another lopsided loss, but at least the deficit dropped 30 points from a year ago.
    “Even though we were on the short end of a pretty lopsided score, we feel like we improved a lot,” North Texas coach Todd Dodge said. “Offensively, I think we can go back and show our kids, and they understand our offense now. We just didn’t play well tonight. Part of it was Kansas State and part of it was us.”
    North Texas figured to give the Wildcats some trouble defensively.
    Running the spread in Dodge’s first season as coach, the Mean Green had the nation’s 18th-best passing offense at 289.7 yards per game a year ago, with quarterback Giovanni Vizza throwing for 2,388 yards and 17 touchdowns in 10 games.
    Kansas State manhandled North Texas from the start in this one, all but eliminating its running game, confining Vizza to throws underneath.
    The Mean Green had poor field position most of the game, thanks to three muffed kickoff returns, and didn’t score until Vizza hit Alex Lott on a 9-yard touchdown pass with 5 seconds left in the third quarter. That score, which made it 42-6, came after Kansas State backup Carson Coffman threw an interception inside the Wildcats’ 30-yard line.
    “There were a couple times during the first two series where you could feel it, we just weren’t executing,” said Vizza, who finished 16-for-29 for 100 yards. “I can definitely take responsibility for that and, really, there were other times where we just didn’t execute well as a unit.”
    The Wildcats overwhelmed North Texas on offense as well, scoring less than two minutes into the game on a 4-yard run by walk-on Keithen Valentine on the way to a 28-0 halftime lead.