With college football down to its final game of the 2022 season, players and coaches from every program but two will be at home watching Monday night, when top-seeded Georgia takes on No. 3 seed TCU for the national championship at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles.
The 2022 season was the best in years for the Kansas football program, which didn’t exactly narrow the gap between itself and a date in a game like Monday’s but did play one of the title game’s participants to within one score this season.
How long has it been since Kansas fans have been able to say that?
In addition to the 38-31 loss to TCU in early October connecting Kansas to this one, Monday’s game also features some other fairly interesting KU ties.
Here’s a quick look.
On the TCU side, four of the Horned Frogs’ coaches or staff members were coaching at KU not that long ago.
TCU offensive coordinator Garrett Riley, the brother of USC head coach Lincoln Riley, was a quarterbacks coach and part-time play-caller at Kansas under David Beaty.
After leaving KU in 2018, Riley coached one season at Appalachian State and then linked up with Sonny Dykes at SMU for two seasons. When Dykes got the head coaching job at TCU in December of 2021, Riley went with him to become the Frogs’ OC and QBs coach.
Staying on the offensive side of the ball, Dykes’ staff also features former Kansas offensive coordinator Doug Meacham as the program’s inside wide receivers coach and AJ Ricker as the co-OC and offensive line coach.
Meacham rejoined the TCU program for his second stint in 2020, prior to Dykes’ arrival. He initially left TCU in 2016 and was at KU for the 2017 and 2018 seasons and he worked as the OC for the XFL’s St. Louis BattleHawks in 2019 before getting back into the college game.
Ricker, who coached the O-Line at Kansas for one season in 2018, was also with Dykes at SMU before moving over to TCU. He also spent time at Oklahoma State, Houston and Missouri before coming to KU and eventually winding up with the Horned Frogs.
TCU’s staff also features former KU recruiting director Tyler Olker, who is in his first year as Dykes’ Director of Player Personnel. Olker was at Kansas for five years, from 2016 to 2020 and he left to join Dykes at SMU before making the move with him to TCU this season.
There are just two players from the state of Kansas on the two rosters — both play for TCU — and a handful of players on the TCU roster who attended Kansas jucos.
On the Georgia side of the field, the connections to Kansas are a little tougher to come by, but there is one fairly big one.
Georgia’s outside linebackers coach, in his first year with the program, is former KU assistant Chidera Uzo-Diribe.
Uzo-Diribe was at Kansas in 2019 and 2020 and he left to join Sonny Dykes at SMU for the 2021 season. When Dykes was hired by TCU, Uzo-Diribe initially went with him, but Georgia hired him last February.
Kickoff for tonight’s game is slated for 6:30 p.m.
