As Andy Kotelnicki attempts in the months ahead to revive the Kansas football offense, the Jayhawks’ new coordinator and play-caller knows whatever level of success the team achieves will depend upon what transpires at the line of scrimmage.
According to Kotelnicki, the offensive line is the most important position group in football.
“And a lot of people talk about what it takes to win leagues and stuff like that. And they say, ‘Oh, this is a quarterback league.’ At the end of the day, I think the teams that consistently play for championships have great line play,” Kotelnicki said.
Before Lance Leipold took over the program and brought several of his former Buffalo assistants, including Kotelnicki, with him to KU, the Jayhawks suffered from miserable O-line play through most of a winless 2020 season.
The goal for Kotelnicki and new offensive line coach Scott Fuchs will be to transform KU’s blockers into a unit that more closely resembles the O-lines they directed at UB than the ones that have struggled at KU in recent years.
The coaches, who worked together the past two seasons at Buffalo, want the Jayhawks to play a physical brand of offense, and they will need to instill that as the transition to a new regime continues.
A lot of coaches, Kotelnicki admits, talk about being a physical football team, “which is great and we believe in that and we will be,” he said, before adding, “but then you have to ask, ‘What do we do to promote physical football?'”
Leipold’s offensive coordinator for the past eight seasons, Kotelnicki said their teams do more than talk about toughness. And they don’t just go into game week practices “beating heads” all day after day and expecting players to be fresh on a Saturday.
According to the staff’s blueprint, the process of promoting physical football — for the O-line, as well as other positions — involves first making sure the players are lively entering a game day.
Kotelnicki said Leipold’s programs also have emphasized and promoted finishing plays and playing with “great strain.” Coaches will show video clips from spring football, preseason practices and games to highlight players “doing it the right way” so that everyone on the team knows what is expected on every snap.
Additionally, Kotelnicki said they will start every practice with what the coaches call a “blow delivery” drill.
“So everyone with the exception of the quarterbacks understands the importance of tight hands and striking,” Kotelnicki said.
This spring, KU’s O-linemen had a different position coach and staff leading them, before Leipold took over. During that time a potential starting group emerged, with senior Earl Bostick Jr. at left tackle, super-senior Malik Clark at left guard, junior transfer Colin Grunhard or super-senior Adagio Lopeti at center, sophomore Armaj Adams-Reed at right guard and redshirt freshman Bryce Cabeldue at right tackle.
Whether that’s how the O-line will look this fall is up to Fuchs and the new staff. In between now and then, the position coach will try to make sure the Jayhawks play with some physicality up front in 2021.
“The idea here is simplicity. And I know people say that. I think Andy really truly believes in that,” Fuchs said of KU’s O.C. “What can we boil something down to? How simple can we make it so that you can play fast?”
By removing the complexities from the equation, Fuchs explained, the coaches can speak more to the culture and how to finish plays, as well as showing those examples to the players on video.
“It’s not just sitting here for an hour and a half talking about where you put your hand on a guy,” Fuchs said. “We’re going to play fast.”
In his years of coaching O-linemen at UB, Wyoming, North Dakota State, Southern Illinois and other programs, Fuchs said he has learned not to get so caught up in technique that it is a detriment to the offense’s production.
“You play fast, you play hard,” Fuchs said of what he wants. “You’re not going to be perfect. Nobody is. You can’t be.”
As with the O-lines he has coached in the past, Fuchs want to find out how fast he can get KU’s O-linemen playing, because he thinks “great effort is going to win a game before technique ever does.”
Of course, the optimal version of what Fuchs expects will take time to achieve. He plans to develop the O-line through repetition.
“You certainly praise the things that you want to see over and over again,” he said. “And you discourage the things you don’t want to see. Through the course of time they learn that, and hopefully that gets you where you want to be.”
Endeavoring to awaken a dormant offense, Kotelnicki’s glad to have an O-line coach he knows and trusts helping him at the point of attack.
“The O-line coach in any system really is a critical part of it — probably the most critical, to be honest with you,” KU’s O.C. said.