It may have taken a little while, but, late in the recruiting process for the Class of 2016, the Kansas University football coaching staff began to make good on its stated goal of adding more in-state players to the KU roster.
Here’s the thing about that quest that KU fans may have forgotten: It’s not entirely up to the KU coaches.
There’s no doubt that David Beaty, Clint Bowen and the rest of the KU coaching staff can make — and have made — recruiting in-state athletes a greater priority, but those athletes still have to pick Kansas in order for the number of Sunflower State studs on KU’s roster to increase.
Given the fact that so many standout Kansans have offers elsewhere — and the fact that the state produces very few D-I prospects on an annual basis — that’s not always an easy task. Add to that the fact that KU is churning its way through the worst stretch in school history and it’s not at all surprising to hear stories about local kids wanting to go somewhere else, no matter how great of a pitch or offer the KU coaches throw at them.
Fortunately for Beaty and company, that pitch proved to be enough recently for a pair of Free State High standouts, who chose KU over other opportunities. The first came last week, when Free State quarterback Bryce Torneden — who projects as a safety at KU — accepted a late scholarship offer from Kansas and, in turn, said no thanks to North Dakota State, where he had been committed for months.
Torneden’s change of heart opened the door for teammate and fellow-Firebird Sam Skwarlo to have a change-of-heart of his own and, instead of walking on at K-State, as was his plan for most of the past few weeks, Skwarlo on Monday decided to take an offer to walk-on at Kansas.
Now, who knows if either player will ever make much of an impact on the KU program. Both are a bit undersized for Big 12 football and both have a long road ahead of them to climb into relevance on the KU depth chart.
But a case could be made that by simply choosing Kansas in the first place Torneden and Skwarlo already have made an impact.
See, these, and others like them, are the types of players that K-State coach Bill Snyder has built his program on during the past few decades. Snyder, of course, also has added all kinds of elite athletes and even a few big time recruits, but for the most part, he’s made K-State into a powerhouse with overlooked, underrated, hard-nosed kids who fit his system, many of them coming from within the borders of Kansas.
I don’t know the specific numbers off the top of my head, but every year when I prepared to cover the Sunflower Showdown, the number of Kansans on each roster blew my mind. It was always something like 45-17 in favor of K-State.
Adding Torneden and Skwarlo in Lawrence not only sets KU on the Bill Snyder path, with the hope that more soon will follow, but it also takes a couple of in-state prospects away from the Wildcats, making this a double victory for the Jayhawks.
