As much as the Kansas football team leaned into getting its youngest prospects onto the field in 2020, only a select few true freshmen, including cornerback Duece Mayberry, actually played in every game.
Though he didn’t start at all this past fall, Mayberry is grateful to bring so much experience with him into his sophomore season.
“I feel like I made a lot of progress,” Mayberry said recently of his nine appearances as a reserve last season. “And the game’s slowing down to me.”
Among the 27 true freshmen on the roster who played in 2020 for the Jayhawks, Mayberry, starting cornerback Karon Prunty and backup receiver Tristan Golightly were the only ones who saw live action in every game.
While manning a cornerback spot as a first-year player in the Big 12 is a challenging endeavor, Mayberry said he benefited from the presence of his older brother, Kyle, a senior corner on the roster at the time.
“He helped me a lot with my development. He told me what to expect,” Duece told reporters earlier this spring. “He told me, ‘This ain’t no game. This is the real deal. You’ve got to come out and play your hardest every practice.'”
The younger Mayberry brother’s involvement in the defensive game plan varied from week to week, but with the help of his veteran sibling and others around him, Duece Mayberry began feeling more comfortable with all the responsibilities and assignments that come with the job as the year went on.
“I think I made my biggest improvement in the middle of the year,” he recalled. “The game was slowing down to me and I started understanding things more. And it just carried on into this year.”
Some of the players Duece leaned on most during his first college season — his brother, Kyle, and starting corner Elijah Jones — have since left the program via the transfer portal.
Even so, two other people in the program remain valuable sources for advice: junior safety Kenny Logan Jr. and defensive backs coach Chevis Jackson.
Both Jackson and KU defensive coordinator DJ Eliot recruited Mayberry, a three-star Class of 2020 signee, out of Owasso High, in Tulsa, Okla. Since that time, Mayberry said, he has looked up to Jackson, a former standout corner at LSU.
“He’s a very good coach,” Mayberry said of Jackson. “He’s helped me with a lot of things.”
With Jones now at Oregon State and Kyle Mayberry finishing his career at Utah State, there is a starting job up for grabs at one of the corner spots for KU.
Duece Mayberry, though, didn’t make any bold predictions during a recent interview when asked if he had a good chance of joining sophomore Karon Prunty as a starting corner. Mayberry said that will be his coach’s decision.
“I’m just going to go out there and work hard,” he said, “and I’m going to let him choose who’s going to be the starters.”
Mayberry’s biggest competition for that starting job could end up being freshman corner Jacobee Bryant, who grayshirted after signing with KU in 2020, and enrolled this spring.
However, Mayberry declined to speculate about which specific corners may be in the running for the role.
“I feel like all of them are my competition,” Mayberry said. “I’m going to go out there every day and work as hard as I can, they’re going out there every day working hard as they can. We’re just going to compete.”
• Karon Prunty – 6-1, 185, so.
• Duece Mayberry – 6-0, 175, so.
• Jacobee Bryant – 6-0, 170, fr.
• DeVonte Wilson – 6-3, 192, fr.
• Valerian Agbaw Jr. – 5-10, 185, so.
• Ra’Mello Dotson – 6-1, 176, RS-fr.
• Johnquai Lewis – 6-0,171, RS-fr.
• Kwinton Lassiter, 5-10, 165, jr.