This is the Depth Dossier: the Kansas Jayhawks, Week 9.

Kansas out-gained TCU by 165 yards on Saturday and still walked out of Fort Worth with a loss, falling 22 to 16 in a game that got away in the final four minutes.

Cole Ballard made his first start in three years, filling in for the injured quarterback Isaiah Marshall, and he looked sharp for most of the day, throwing for 285 yards and a touchdown to wide receiver Cam Pickett. But one play changed everything. His third-quarter interception got returned 60 yards for a touchdown by TCU's Max Carroll, and that turned a comfortable 13 to nothing Kansas lead into a rally the Jayhawks never recovered from. Kicker Martin Connington did what he could, hitting three field goals, including a go-ahead 27-yarder with under five minutes to play, but the defense gave up an 84-yard game-winning drive capped by a two-point conversion. That drops Kansas to 0 and 6 in Fort Worth since 2012.

Here's the thing about this one: the box score barely makes sense next to the result. Kansas ran 81 plays to TCU's 57, piled up 451 yards to TCU's 286, and controlled the ball for nearly 39 minutes against just 21 for TCU. That's almost a two-to-one edge in time of possession, and Kansas still lost by six. It's one of those rare games where Kansas genuinely outplayed the other team in just about every phase and it still didn't matter.

The turning point really was that one interception return. Kansas had built its lead patiently, grinding out a 13-play field-goal drive and a 10-play field-goal drive to get to 13 to nothing at the half. One throw erased all of that work in an instant.

TCU's coaching staff also made a gutsy call that decided the finish. After going back ahead late, they chose to go for two instead of kicking the extra point, and they got it, turning what would've been a one-score game into a six-point game. That took away any chance for Kansas to simply tie things with a field goal at the end.

And then there's the red zone problem. Kansas settled for three field goals instead of touchdowns, and a big reason why was running back Dylan Edwards getting bottled up, just 42 yards on 20 carries, a little over two yards a carry, after racking up 156 yards the week before. Without a push on the ground, Kansas kept leaving points on the field.

Now, on to the depth chart, where there were no new injuries to report, so all the movement here is about roles shifting after the performance.

Up front on the defensive line, the consolidation that started last week kept rolling. Leroy Harris the third and Blake Herold are clearly the top two now, playing the bulk of the snaps, while David Santiago, Marcus Calvin, Dakyus Brinkley and Kevin Oatis are all seeing expanded rotational time. Guys like Alex Bray and Jibriel Conde have been pushed down to spot duty. Two straight weeks now of the same trend, so this looks like a settled rotation.

At linebacker, it's going the other way. Trey Lathan's playing time dipped slightly, Bam Crouch and Quincy Davis are down to around half the snaps, and Malachi Curvey is down to spot duty. It's starting to look like the staff just prefers leaning on the front over the second level.

In the secondary, cornerback Austin Alexander is now playing basically every snap, and Roman Pearson and Jalen Todd have both jumped up to the bulk of the defensive snaps. That's a notable increase, especially given how little it showed up in stopping TCU's comeback. Worth watching next week whether that bigger role in the secondary actually translates into fewer big plays allowed, because on Saturday, it didn't.

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