Kansas’ veteran wide receivers have a clearly defined short-term goal.
“We want to win the (Big) 12,” senior Lawrence Arnold said on Sunday. “We’re going to win the 12. I’m 100% confident in our team.”
The specific way they approach preparing for that goal, however, could impact the state of KU’s wide receiver room on a long-term basis.
The group is currently headlined by five seniors, three of whom — Arnold, Luke Grimm and Quentin Skinner — have dominated the Jayhawks’ passing game over the past several years. When their careers are over in January, with a Big 12 championship or not, what will they leave behind?
Young players such as scholarship redshirt freshmen Keaton Kubecka and Jarred Sample, plus the likes of Bryce Cohoon and Isreal Moses V, are the only ones who will remain at the position after 2024. As such, as they aim for a monumental 2024 season, the veterans are also charged with instilling good habits in their teammates.
“We just teach them everything that we learned the past years we’ve been here from freshman to now,” Arnold said. “We just teach them everything that we learned and what the older guys taught us, like Kwamie Lassiter, Andrew Parchment, things like that. The stuff that they taught us, we just pass that down and hopefully they just keep doing that with the guys that come in after us.”
In the spring, wide receivers coach Terrence Samuel issued a bit of a challenge to those young wideouts; He said he needed them to start making more plays.
“They’re just numbers right now,” he said then. “I don’t want to put no names to them just yet, because we got a lot to get done.”
On Sunday, he had a more positive outlook.
Cohoon and Moses were playing faster; Cohoon, a late-spring addition, was “doing what he needs to do to put himself in a position to play.” And while Kubecka still had some bad habits to kick, Samuel said of the redshirt freshman from Austin, Texas, “Put it this way: I do not have a problem with Keaton playing an entire game or an entire season.”
“If they continue to play fast,” Samuel said, “then they can help us.”
One key development for the young wideouts’ future prospects is the recent rule change allowing analysts and quality-control staffers to assist in hands-on coaching during practices and games. KU brought in former Iowa wide receivers coach Kelton Copeland in July to help at Samuel’s position. Samuel said, “We should be able to get some guys progressed a lot faster.”
“Where I might have missed some of those things and may not have been able to address some of those things, we got eyes on those guys,” he said.
Grimm said that hearing from two distinct voices can be useful even if they’re expressing fundamentally the same sentiment.
“Sometimes you might get frustrated where you’re running a route and it’s like the same thing every time: they’re like ‘You need to shave it off and you’re not,'” he said. “And then Coach Copeland came in, he’s like ‘You need to think about it like this,’ and they’re like, ‘Oh, OK, makes sense.'”
Even before Copeland’s arrival, the offense had another unexpected coaching addition: Arnold himself. The veteran wideout spent the spring recovering from injury and was frequently seen on a mobility scooter. (Only recently did he get back into action for KU’s scrimmage at Rock Chalk Park: “It felt good, I’m not going to lie. It had been a minute. Last time I had my shoulder pads on was the bowl game.”)
“Coaches had given me a script, I was helping with the huddles,” Arnold said of the spring. “We do three huddles, so I was telling guys what position they (were) in, what personnel is in, what’s the play call for the quarterback.”
Beyond Arnold’s former assignment, though, the veterans feel a responsibility to set up their younger teammates for success later on.
“Just the fact of us being here for four years together, five years for some of us — it’s just like, sticking out through the bad times, getting to be a part of the good times with each other, and then really leaving this place at a good spot for all these young guys below us,” Grimm said, “where they don’t have to go through the bad times, but they need to keep these good times rolling.”
As Arnold could tell you, a player like Kubecka could be going through his last fall camp before he knows it.
“You get in college as a freshman, they tell you ‘You got all the time in the world,'” he said, “but you really don’t, and in the blink of an eye, you (are) a freshman and then a senior.”