Kansas cornerback Cobee Bryant may keep some opposing quarterbacks up at night, but late Monday he was the one dealing with a bout of insomnia.
“I couldn’t go to sleep, man,” he said. “My girl (asked) why I’m still up, then around 5 o’clock, woke up — man, I can’t sleep, I’m ready to go play football.”
Bryant eventually made it to the grass fields on KU’s campus near Hoglund Ballpark early Tuesday morning for the Jayhawks’ first day of fall camp ahead of the 2024 season, as they prepare to open the campaign on Aug. 29.
“Last fall camp with KU,” he said, as one of more than 30 seniors on the roster. “I feel kind of sad at first, but we got a goal to accomplish.”
Running back Devin Neal said position coach Jonathan Wallace told him before practice, “It’s the first of lasts.”
As has often been the case during the Jayhawks’ climb toward national relevance, they, and particularly their senior leaders, are charged with both acknowledging the progress they’ve made thus far since head coach Lance Leipold’s arrival — back-to-back bowl appearances and a victory last year to cap off a nine-win season — and recognizing they have much left to do.
“We like the progress that we’ve made so far,” quarterback Jalon Daniels said. “We like where we’re headed.”
Leipold added: “We’ll be evaluated now on what happens here going forward … We’ve got a lot more that we need to do to be the consistent program we want to be.”
As it is now, the veteran Jayhawks are seeing the tangible results of their work over the last several years in a couple ways.
For one thing, they’re practicing on the grass fields in the first place, instead of their usual turf, because they need to prepare for Children’s Mercy Park and GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium in the fall, which is in turn because David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium is currently getting renovated into a radically different facility.
“We practiced out there a few times during my career,” Daniels said, “but being able to practice on grass will allow us to be able to go to the new stadiums that we’ll be playing at and be able to make sure that we’ll have a smooth transition.”
Leipold said KU intends to practice on grass as much as it possibly can during camp, and that players wanted to do so.
“I think all our legs and knees and joints and all that stuff feel better,” Leipold said, “and I’m not getting any younger, so I was kind of for it.”
In addition, players are getting the chance to experience a revamped Anderson Family Football Complex.
They got into the facility Monday to see many of its new amenities; Neal liked the sauna and the cryo chamber, while Bryant said of the training room, “I already told the trainer, I was like, ‘I ain’t going home. I’m going to be all night.'”
“As soon as you walk through the doors it looks totally different from how it was before,” Daniels said. “Then you walk downstairs to blue everywhere … You see the players’ lounge, you’re able to see the massage chairs in a different room, glass everywhere, you’re able to see through a lot of rooms, I mean, definitely looks very futuristic.”
These upgrades are part of the second phase of renovations to the complex, after the new locker and weight rooms opened a year ago.
Even though current seniors like Neal and Bryant won’t be around for the finished stadium, they can enjoy these markers of progress along the way.
“I think that really just speaks to who Coach is as a person, because easily, he could postpone everything, let it build up, and not (have) us experience any of it,” Neal said. “Just allowing us to experience all of it is really cool for us.”
Leipold said seeing players’ reactions “was like a Christmas Day type of thing.”
“It’s like almost a refresher,” defensive end Jereme Robinson said. “Yeah, we can battle with anybody in the country with our facilities, and now we can just show it off and wait on our stadium next.”
Kansas quarterback Jalon Daniels during the first day of fall camp on Tuesday, July 30, 2024, in Lawrence.
A welcome sight
KU’s entire roster took the field as a group for the first time on Tuesday, and as exciting as it was for Bryant and the rest, it might have meant a little more for Daniels. The starting quarterback, who missed most of last season and was limited in the spring by a back injury, said it felt like he was his childhood self out there playing football again.
“When you’re away from the game and it’s something that you’ve done your whole entire life,” he said, “when you get the chance to be able to get back, you cherish every single moment, because at the end of the day you never know when’s your last play, you never know when (is) the last time you’ll be able to play the game again.”
Leipold said Daniels “had a really good day” and did “probably the most 11-on-11 stuff that he’d maybe done yet.”
“What he’s gone through now can sometimes be a benefit for us in a very odd way,” Leipold said. “And that is, he is so happy to be out there he embraces every snap he gets, and that can be contagious to a football team too.”
His teammates were certainly happy to have him in the fold.
“We want to see him be at his best,” Neal said, “and he’s smiling, he’s being a great leader, just really excited.”
Chance Parker/Special to the Journal-World
Chance Parker/Special to the Journal-World