Around the time Kansas hosted UCF last October, defensive tackle Caleb Taylor wanted to get on the field more, and he sat down with Jim Panagos for a fateful conversation.
“I believe football is a game of series of efforts,” said Panagos, Taylor’s position coach. “Each play is seven seconds, and I believe seven seconds equals seven (sequences) of efforts, and we kind of talked about that.”
Panagos gave Taylor a set of technical objectives to help him get on the field — back on the field, more specifically, after he had started at times in 2021 and then worked as a reserve for nearly a season and a half.
Soon enough, they both started to see results.
“From there, he’s playing fanatically, hard, physical,” Panagos said, “and I think he’s just embraced it.”
The first signs of that play style presented themselves in the later days of the 2023 season. Taylor flashed in the Oklahoma State game a week after UCF and had a bit of a coming-out party at Iowa State in November, securing key stops on Cyclones quarterback Rocco Becht on a pair of occasions. As Panagos put it, “He was the player of the game for us on defense,” and for Taylor it was a clear sign that he was getting more comfortable.
“Some people are always a little nervous when they first come out,” Taylor said, “but just being able to make those plays over the season, the anxiety lessens and lessens a bit as you go on.”
Now he’s playing with more confidence and consistency than ever before ahead of his fifth season in the program. As defensive coordinator Brian Borland put it, “The lightbulb went on.”
“I do believe that he kind of said, ‘Hey, this is rapidly coming to the end for me,'” Borland said, “‘and I want to make sure that I go out on a good note and I want to go out at my best.'”
As a result, he’s risen to the top of the defensive tackle group and established himself as what head coach Lance Leipold called “a very respected leader in a very quiet way in this program.”
“I’ve been here a while,” Taylor said. “It was a long process for me to actually get to where I am now, but I think mostly it was just me running my race and getting to the point in my journey where everything finally starts to come together.”
Much of the work has come off the field. For one thing, Taylor, a St. Louis native who arrived at KU in 2020, has frequently acknowledged that 2023 was the first year in which he was able to retain the weight he put on in the offseason.
“Now he’s over 310 and holding it,” Leipold said. “Our first year, he might have been under 260 at one time trying to play in games. That’s hard to hold out. You wonder why people are running the ball on you and you’re under 260 in the interior.”
Taylor said he’s also had to make a concerted effort to establish himself a leader. He always garnered his teammates’ respect, he said, but he needed to both become comfortable with that status and get to a point where his level of play on the field justified such a role.
“Once you gain everybody’s respect and show people that you’re doing it the right way and doing the right things, and then you try to go on and try to bring some people with you,” he said, “slowly, slowly, more people want to come with you rather than you having to go out and force them.”
Whatever he’s been able to accomplish, it’s made a clear impact on new entries into the program.
“That guy, I love working with him,” said newly arrived North Dakota State transfer Javier Derritt, “just because like I said, he’s one of those guys who’s in here 24/7 trying to find something to get better at, trying to push us to get better.”
Added Panagos: “He’s really making my job a lot easier.”
Part of Taylor’s leadership has consisted of organizing the defensive tackles’ Thursday night gatherings, where they’ll watch football and play board games, a tradition whose mantle he took from former Jayhawks Jelani Arnold and Sam Burt when they graduated.
“When they left, when it was my turn to be the leader, if that’s what you want to call it,” he said. “That’s the one thing that Jelani specifically asked me to do, is to make sure that the culture and the tightness of the room doesn’t die.”
He’s preserved the tradition, which helps bring new additions like Derritt and young tackles Marcus Calvin and Blake Herold into the fold, and even increased its frequency.
“Now it’s grown to the point where there’s an expectation of it,” Taylor said. “They get mad at me if it’s too much time between us doing it.”
The result, he believes, is a direct translation to on-field results.
“I think that it helps push each other and it helps us trust each other, just because we know each other better,” Taylor said.
It’s easy to forget given the level of attention his off-field leadership has garnered, but Taylor could break out on the field in 2024, too. Defensive end and longtime teammate Jereme Robinson said as much at Big 12 media days in July, calling his on-field play “unhuman, I promise you.”
Panagos will rotate extensively through a pool of experienced tackles as usual, with D.J. Withers, Tommy Dunn, Derritt, Kenean Caldwell, Calvin and Herold all in the room with Taylor. But as Panagos points out, it’s Taylor’s senior season and they need him to deliver a big one.
“I’m really pulling for a guy like him this year,” Leipold said, “because I think he’s worked hard and he deserves it.”
Kansas defensive lineman Caleb Taylor (53) deflects a pass from Texas Tech quarterback Behren Morton (2) during the fourth quarter on Saturday Nov. 11, 2023 at Memorial Stadium. Photo by Nick Krug
Chance Parker/Special to the Journal-World
