Kansas is rotating through various players to occupy its fourth team captain spot over the course of the 2025 season, and of course it made sense for head coach Lance Leipold to pick middle linebacker Trey Lathan — a West Virginia transfer — during the week the Mountaineers were in town.
But that was just one factor in Leipold’s decision to place Lathan alongside Jalon Daniels, Justice Finkley and Bryce Foster at the start of Saturday’s game.
“Trey has been playing good football,” Leipold said, “and Trey has become more confident and more vocal and has become a better leader within our defense and our program, and he’s well respected, so that was also a part of the equation.”
And, Leipold added, “maybe being a former Mountaineer had something to do with it as well.”
Whatever the case, Lathan proved a particularly fitting choice because of what took place during the game on Saturday, too. KU’s leading tackler on the season was a big factor in how the Jayhawks extended their victory over his former team into a 41-10 blowout.
“Trey Lathan has been doing a lot of great things in this program, both on and off the field,” quarterback Jalon Daniels said.
There was plenty to talk about on the field on Saturday.
After wide receiver Emmanuel Henderson Jr. returned the second-half kickoff for a touchdown, Lathan burst untouched through the Mountaineers’ offensive line for a second-down sack of his former teammate Nicco Marchiol that torpedoed WVU’s first series of the half.
Later, he chased Marchiol from the game altogether, reading the quarterback’s eyes and jumping in front of a pass intended for Cam Vaughn on a comeback route. Lathan snagged the interception and returned the ball 32 yards into the red zone. The next time WVU’s offense came out it was led by Jaylen Henderson.
The truth was, Lathan said postgame, that he had “envisioned” the interception prior to Saturday’s game.
“I knew it was going to come,” Lathan said postgame. “I was just happy, and I just went up, pointed at my mom. I told them I was going to get a pick.”
That was something of a bold prediction given that it was the first interception of his collegiate career — although he took care to note that in a certain sense, it’s not really his first since he was in high school. (He did have two as a senior at Gulliver Prep in Miami in 2021.)
“I picked off JD in practice a little bit,” Lathan said. “He ain’t going to tell nobody, though.”
The linebacker from Goulds, Florida, has had no issue translating his play from the practice field to games over the course of the first third of KU’s schedule. He’s now up to 28 tackles on the year, including 4.5 for loss, with 1.5 sacks, a pair of pass breakups and of course the interception he manifested.
Part of the reason why Lathan has needed to be so consistently active is a lack of depth for KU at the linebacker position due to injuries, but as he put it on Saturday, the Jayhawks are “loading back up.”
On the weak side, KU now has its full complement of players with Bangally Kamara back in the fold (and without any injury designation this week) and Jon Jon Kamara and Logan Brantley behind him, and Jayson Gilliom has also started to see increased action. Perhaps most notably, Bowling Green transfer Joseph Sipp Jr. made his debut as a Jayhawk on Saturday.
