It’s hard to tire out Kansas strength coach Matt Gildersleeve, but the process of onboarding KU’s class of transfer-portal additions back in the winter did just that.
“I would do it tenfold over again,” he said.
When the 2025 season concluded, KU’s longtime director of sports performance looked back on the offseason that had preceded it — the first one in head coach Lance Leipold’s tenure that had included such a wide-ranging group of transfers — and decided it had taken too long for the strength staff to get to know its new players.
“You’re two weeks into training, you’re learning these things about these guys’ bodies and whatever it may be,” he said. “You don’t have two weeks to waste.”
With another cycle of acquisitions on the horizon, Gildersleeve decided it was time for a change.
This past January, he said, before KU’s more than 30 transfers even started training, they had already undergone screenings with the strength and training staffs and individual 30-minute sit-down meetings with Gildersleeve “about their personal goals, their ambitions, their whys, what they wanted to do.” Not to mention that Gildersleeve and his staff had already both obtained past injury reports and spoken with strength coaches from every athlete’s previous institution.
Now, Gildersleeve estimates that the process, exhausting though it was, saved KU three or four weeks of productivity. Considering that the Jayhawks’ offseason strength program was, all told, about six weeks longer this year — they pushed the start of spring football back for longer winter workouts, and will begin their regular season nearly two weeks later — it’s been a fruitful year in the weight room for Gildersleeve’s charges.
“We’re a much-different-looking football team than we’ve ever been, but especially when you look at it from a year ago,” he said.
Meeting with the media on Wednesday, Gildersleeve pulled out a wealth of statistics to support that claim, some of which he had printed out and brought with him to the podium. In terms of team speed, KU has gone from three players running at least 22 mph to 11, from 15 running at least 21 mph to 39 and from 47 running at least 20 mph to 62; the average speed has therefore increased from 19 to 20.23.
The defensive line is 11 pounds heavier on average than it was in 2025, and the offensive line outweighs last year’s by nine pounds. Projected impact players at the skill positions like running back Dylan Edwards (a transfer from Kansas State) and Nik McMillan (Buffalo) have bulked up by about 15 pounds each. Georgia Tech safety Christian Pritchett, already one of the fastest players on the team at 22.64 mph, has also added 10 pounds and 6 inches to his vertical jump.
The true results will be borne out on the field, of course — Gildersleeve likes to say that his players came to KU to play football, not lift weights — but these early indications suggest that the strength program has been appropriately welcoming to its newest participants.
Getting new players to discuss gory details of their medical history is not always easy, as Gildersleeve noted.
“Guys want to come in and they want to start off right, so there’s a lot of things, like, they don’t want to disclose everything, whatever it may be,” he said, “but if you had a right knee patellar tendinopathy in high school, I want to know about it, because it does make a difference in what we’re thinking about how we’re going to train you.”
This is why KU had four “layers” of onboarding with the two screenings, the meeting with him and the call to the past team’s coach. If a player has an issue with his L3 vertebra, Gildersleeve said, “that’s awesome to know, instead of the first day he comes back and I put a bar on his back and all of a sudden his lower back hurts for two weeks and we lose two weeks of training.
“That didn’t happen this year.”
