The Kansas football team and first-year head coach David Beaty are less than two weeks away from the start of a new season and a new era. But when one considers the long road ahead for the first-time head coach and the program in general, it’s hard to forget KU got to this point with the help of former head coach Charlie Weis.
[ESPN’s Jake Trotter made that abundantly clear][1] in a piece examining the state of KU football, referring to Weis’s two-plus seasons at KU — when the Jayhawks went 6-22 — as “utterly ruinous.”
Trotter points out KU would have been much better off hiring Gus Malzahn, then offensive coordinator at Auburn, instead of Weis.
> “For Kansas, the Malzahn match made
> too much sense,” Trotter writes. “But
> in a defining decision, the Jayhawks
> changed course in the final moments
> and opted to go with the biggest name
> they could get.”
Malzahn, of course, went on to coach at Arkansas State for one season before returning to Auburn as head coach. The Tigers went 12-2 his first year and 8-5 in 2014. Who knows how he would have fared in Lawrence. But you get the feeling the guy could (eventually) win anywhere.
Maybe in a few years, once Beaty and his staff have time to recruit and train multiple batches of recruiting classes, he can win at Kansas, too — just like his former boss, Mark Mangino.
For the time being, the upbeat Beaty and his energy-filled assistants will have to begin a slow, steady rebuilding project this fall. A one- or two-win season seems likely to be in play at KU. As ESPN points out, since 2000, 20 major-conference teams have finished with one victory or fewer — including Weis’s 2012 Jayhawks. Trotter says Beaty has a “herculean task to keep the 2015 Jayhawks from joining that ignominious club.”
As you know by now, the lack of marquee returning starters and a deficiency in scholarship players are what make KU’s current situation so daunting.
And those are the reason’s Weis’s name will continue to come up as Beaty’s Jayhawks compete this season.
[1]: http://espn.go.com/blog/big12/post/_/id/102510/kansas-picking-up-pieces-after-ruinous-charlie-weis-era
