LAWRENCE, Kan. — By 4 p.m. Saturday, the field inside Kansas Memorial Stadium had been cleared, vacated by all but a couple of workers packing up items from the team benches. To the southwest, outside the stadium, a cleanup crew paced over what students here simply refer to as The Hill.
And with that, an hour after TCU’s 38-31 victory against KU, it was as if it all never happened — a reminder for the program least in need of one of how quickly it all can vanish.
Win or lose, and it did lose, the KU football team actually had a signature moment for its program earlier Saturday, even if its aftermath left not a trace of evidence. A third straight sold-out stadium. A crowd for ESPN’s College GameDay show as deep as you could see if you happened to be looking up The Hill.
A moment, though. That’s all.
The idea is to transform this into something that is still percolating for years to come, or at least by the time you’re home for dinner. Something that could happen again next weekend.
That’s the conversation with KU athletics director Travis Goff 45 minutes before kickoff.
“Just because you get to this moment,” he says, “doesn’t mean it just stays here.”
So?
“Foot on the gas.”
Goff’s job is different than the one he took 18 months ago. The tallest task originally — to rescue a football program that has been drowning for a decade — has some promise. Some attention, too. Casual fans are talking Kansas football. Students on campus recognize the star quarterback. A week ago, KU football had more social media engagement than any program in the country.
Is it an aberration?
Goff’s job is basically to ensure it isn’t, and while that is a multi-faceted task slated to include an upgrade to the football facilities announced Friday, I’ll cut the chase for the lead answer:
Lance Leipold.
It takes more than one person to turn around a program as disastrous as KU’s had become, but the coach in charge is worthy of the interest from elsewhere. And it just so happens two spots in which he has connections, Nebraska and Wisconsin, already have openings.
It puts KU in a unique position — no longer searching for whom to invest but rather how much. They should consider it a luxury. At long last, they have the guy.
The pressing question changes: How far are they willing to stretch the finances?
“We think and talk every day about all the factors that are critical to sustaining this build. And obviously, Lance Leipold’s been that denominator over 16 months,” Goff says. “So certainly, KU’s not going to sit idle. KU’s gonna be forward-looking, KU’s gonna challenge itself to make sure that we’re doing all the things to demonstrate to everybody that this is a place that you don’t have to sacrifice and you can win at the highest level.”
Goff is coy about offering specifics, but there’s a smile with that answer that could be construed as something more like a wink.
The school does not plan to wait on a potential Wisconsin or Nebraska offer. Proactive, not reactive.
KU appears ready to fully invest in its football program, an operation that has the approval to the top of the university administration. That investment will reach the hundreds of millions with the project to upgrade football facilities, which will start with the team’s practice building before reaching the stadium itself, but none will be more vital than the guy who delivered the reason for it.
Even a billion-dollar stadium doesn’t look pretty if the team inside it wins five games in six years.
There’s been a culture change since Leipold’s arrival, if you hear the players tell it, one that arrived before the winning, not because of it, and that’s an important distinction when determining the signs for the future. KU’s 5-1 record isn’t carried by one person, intriguing as the Jalon Daniels story has been. The Jayhawks almost beat a ranked team Saturday with Daniels, their long-shot Heisman candidate, on the sideline, his right shoulder in an apparent sling.
Before the game Saturday, the end zone was lined with a string of recruits, some who probably never would have considered stepping on KU’s campus a year ago.
“That’s what this place can be and what this place is,” Goff says. “And that’s what this football program has proven. It’s just special to take it all in.”
The fanbase is so starved for something that they offered the Jayhawks a standing ovation as they were walking off the field Saturday — after they lost, mind you.
Goff recognized that hunger, and he’s tapping into it. Twelve hours before our conversation, as an ESPN set resided on the university campus, Goff hosted a dinner party at his house Friday evening. And if you’re thinking he wanted to bask in the football team’s 5-0 start or its sudden national spotlight, it’s quite the opposite.
There’s urgency for the next steps and a recognition of the need . Earlier Friday morning, KU had announced not only a project to renovate the school’s football stadium, but a date on when that project would start. It’s the latter piece — the date — that Goff uses to make a point that this time the venue will get the upgrade has been promised one too many times in the past, absent the follow-through.
So the invitation to his dinner party, which he hosted at his home, stretched to upwards of 120 guests, potential donors. It is a necessary don’t-rest-on-your-laurels situation, even as those laurels were about to make a pretty good sales pitch Saturday morning.
It’s a critical but opportunistic point for KU, but for all the best reasons. Other schools might want what they have, and when was the last time we said that about Kansas football?
The impact here stretches beyond one team. As they are determining their football program’s fate, in the era of conference re-alignment, there is more than a slight possibility they are determining the fate of the entire athletics department. The suitors look first to your football program, second to your football program once more and then perhaps to your literal national championship basketball team.
There’s a reason the football team has eaten up more of Goff’s time than any other sport. It was in need of rescue upon his arrival — his trips to these games just one year ago looked quite different — but there’s also no program with a larger trickle-down effect.
Which always leads back to the same topic — the investment.
“I feel so lucky to have arrived at an institution that would really truly not just want football to be successful but is willing to do what it took for football to be successful,” Goff says. “And I guess what I would say is we haven’t had any pushback, any barriers, institutionally, to doing what we need to do to make this program successful.”
They’ve had a good six weeks, even with a loss to TCU. Next up is turning it into a good six years.
On Saturday, after the crews had finished cleaning Memorial Stadium, they left one College GameDay sign hanging. Draped over the railing in front of the lower deck, its message read clear as day.
“Lance 4 Life.”
