KU football now has to turn the page

By Henry Greenstein     Oct 31, 2023

article image AP Photo/Charlie Riedel
Kansas cornerback Kwinton Lassiter (8) celebrates after an NCAA college football game against Oklahoma Saturday, Oct. 28, 2023, in Lawrence. Kansas won 38-33.

Kansas coach Lance Leipold said Monday that he admired how his Iowa State counterpart Matt Campbell steered his squad through distractions back in the summer — when the Cyclones saw an ever-growing number of their student-athletes disciplined in an ongoing sports gambling investigation — and still put the team on track for a good season (5-3, 4-1 Big 12 Conference so far).

“A sign of an excellent head coach is navigating his team through that, and they have,” Leipold said.

It’s now Leipold’s turn to help his own team silence some outside noise.

In his case, though, that noise originates from an onslaught of well-wishers after Kansas stunned No. 6 Oklahoma Saturday for a memorable upset, earning bowl eligibility for the second straight year in the process and surging back into the AP Top 25.

“Big win, they earned it, but our ability to play well after big wins — we need to play better, I think, after some of these wins,” Leipold said. “And how do we want to approach it? What do they want to do? They have an opportunity. We have to go on the road and play a first-place team.”

Leipold is right that KU has been a bit spotty coming off its hard-fought home victories over the last six weeks — the Jayhawks barely escaped a poor Nevada team after downing Illinois in prime time, struggled at Texas after opening Big 12 play with a win over BYU and saw a victory slip away at Oklahoma State a week after demolishing UCF.

Going back to last year, the Jayhawks lost four straight once they had beaten a ranked OSU team to earn bowl eligibility.

“Where are we going to be?” he said. “Are we just satisfied with bowl eligibility or do we want to be a team that continues to take steps?”

Leipold is also right that — as hard as it would have been to believe after that gambling scandal, which implicated ISU’s previous starting quarterback Hunter Dekkers and leading rusher Jirehl Brock among five projected starters — the Cyclones are right there at the top of the Big 12. It’s all the more impressive given that they lost 10-7 to Ohio immediately before conference play.

They are one of five teams tied with 4-1 conference records, along with Kansas State, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and Texas. KU, meanwhile, is down at 3-2 with West Virginia.

Saturday night’s matchup at Jack Trice Stadium in Ames, Iowa, to be televised on ESPN, will go a long way toward determining if either KU or ISU can stick in the league race entering the final few weeks of the schedule.

The Jayhawks have work to do if they want to remain in that conversation. In the OU upset win, KU had a postgame win expectancy of 17%, according to ESPN’s Bill Connelly. That was the lowest mark for a team that actually ended up winning last weekend; the next closest such mark was 44% for Penn State against Iowa.

In other words, the Jayhawks could have done a lot better, even in such a dramatic victory. They gave up 274 rushing yards to what is usually a lackluster Oklahoma run game. Trevor Wilson fumbled a kickoff and Jason Bean threw two late interceptions (in Bean’s case, for the second game in a row) while completing less than half of his passes. KU failed on three two-point conversion tries. Seth Keller missed a 42-yard field goal that wasn’t especially close.

Tight end Mason Fairchild put it into words Saturday, not long after the game had concluded: “Coach Leipold always does a good job kind of grounding the situation. We can’t be too high, can’t be too low no matter what. And we obviously got to own the film because there was a lot of mistakes we made today.”

Leipold, describing those film sessions Monday, noted that he often says that “life’s not a highlight film,” even if “sometimes we want to pretend it is.”

“Win or lose, we’ve got to be able to come in and be coachable and accept what’s on the film,” Leipold said. “Yeah, we want to show good plays. But you know, that’s what ‘SportsCenter’ and all the recap shows and the sports on television, that’s what everybody else does.”

He said the NCAA simply doesn’t allocate enough time for the team to spend the minutes they have doing something other than improving. That means that in his brief windows to speak to his players, he’s not going to be overly negative but he often needs to be scrupulous about pointing out mistakes.

“There’s enough people outside this building that are telling everybody how great they are,” he said.

article imageAP Photo/Charlie Riedel

Kansas players celebrate with fans on the field after their NCAA college football game against Oklahoma Saturday, Oct. 28, 2023, in Lawrence. Kansas won 38-33.

article imageAP Photo/Charlie Riedel

Kansas tight end Mason Fairchild runs the ball during the second half of an NCAA college football game against Oklahoma Saturday, Oct. 28, 2023, in Lawrence. Kansas won 38-33.

article imageAP Photo/Charlie Riedel

Kansas head coach Lance Leipold talks to an official during the second half of an NCAA college football game against Oklahoma Saturday, Oct. 28, 2023, in Lawrence, Kan. Kansas won 38-33.

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110047KU football now has to turn the page

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Written By Henry Greenstein

Henry is the sports editor at the Lawrence Journal-World and KUsports.com, and serves as the KU beat writer while managing day-to-day sports coverage. He previously worked as a sports reporter at The Bakersfield Californian and is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis (B.A., Linguistics) and Arizona State University (M.A., Sports Journalism). Though a native of Los Angeles, he has frequently been told he does not give off "California vibes," whatever that means.