Kansas quarterback David McComb was at the forefront of a breakthrough year in the Edmond Memorial High School football program.
As a senior, he helped the Bulldogs to just their second-ever playoff win and their first trip to the Class 6A-I semifinals since their district split into multiple high schools in 1994, according to The Oklahoman.
That drew the admiration of his future quarterbacks coach and offensive coordinator, Jim Zebrowski.
“It was really cool for him to stay in the same school … I was really impressed by that,” Zebrowski told reporters on March 4. “When it wasn’t a football-type school, he helped it become a football school.”
That is, of course, precisely what Zebrowski, Lance Leipold and the rest have tried to do with KU’s program more broadly at the collegiate level. And McComb himself could play a big role, in future years, toward helping the Jayhawks continue to establish themselves on the national stage.
Right now, though, he’s merely an early-enrolling freshman settling into college.
“It’s been great,” McComb said on Saturday. “A lot of guys have been helping me. Cole (Ballard) and Isaiah (Marshall), even (Jalon Daniels) has been helping me just learn the playbook. Every time I have a question they’re there for me on the field, and off the field too.”
McComb was a three-star recruit out of Memorial, where he finished his career as the Bulldogs’ all-time leader in passing yards and touchdowns.
Not a lot of programs were recruiting McComb, at least before the team started to have some success — “It’s so funny,” Zebrowski said, “guys, all of a sudden, they go from a one-star or two-star to like a 22-star” — but KU Director of Player Personnel Grant Murray took note because he was finely attuned to the sorts of attributes Zebrowski covets.
“Two words I always look for is loose and sudden,” Zebrowski said, also mentioning that McComb has a slightly unusual arm angle for off-platform throws. “He’s sudden in his ability to make decisions and make different types of throws, and he has loose hips.”
McComb received a scholarship offer from KU in May 2023 and committed to the Jayhawks just two months later, before even starting his junior year of high school. He got to see KU’s entire 2025 class take shape over the course of the next year and a half.
“We’re not as fast as the ’26 class,” McComb said. “The ’26 class has a lot of recruits coming in. But it was good to see some guys like (wide receiver and fellow early enrollee) Bryson Hayes flip and all that stuff. We built a pretty strong class. We have some great guys coming in.”
Also in that time, KU switched offensive coordinators twice from Andy Kotelnicki to Jeff Grimes and then again to Zebrowski. McComb said he thought Zebrowski might have gotten the gig when Kotelnicki left, “but sometimes it doesn’t work out that way and he’s done a great job so far.”
“I’m super excited because he’s recruited me from the start,” McComb said. “He’s the guy that offered me. He wants to throw the ball, obviously. You can see that at practice. He knows, he just knows it. He loves the game, he loves everything about it. It’s great.”
As for McComb himself, he said he’s picked up the playbook pretty quickly (“That’s something I kind of take pride in”) and more generally benefited from enrolling early. But he’s encountered other challenges as he learns to read defenses more quickly and improve his footwork.
The biggest hurdles have been more mental than physical, he said.
“You got to always look for that next rep,” McComb added. “Don’t get too down if I mess up, because I’m a freshman, I’m going to make mistakes and just learn from it and keep improving.”
He is indeed only a freshman at this juncture, and low down the pecking order at quarterback, even with Daniels extremely limited during the spring due to his recent knee procedure. But as Leipold said recently, “David McComb has shown, in the bit of work that he gets, to be everything that we want him to be and more.”
Kahner Sampson/Special to the Journal-World
