LAWRENCE, Kan. — In the wake of its exhilarating 55-42 overtime win at West Virginia last week, Kansas football is 2-0 for the first time since 2011 and leads the nation in scoring (55.5) points a game.
Quarterback Jalon Daniels stood No. 3 on the “Week 2 Heisman Hype” list of my estimable friend Dennis Dodd, the national college football writer for CBS Sports. And second-year coach Lance Leipold is the object of speculation to be among the potential targets of Nebraska for its suddenly vacant job.
We’ll get back to the considerable matter of sustaining this trend after a decade-plus of alternately dormant and turbulent times in the program.
But at least right here, right now, entering its game at Houston (1-1) on Saturday, KU football somehow has morphed from finding a reason to believe to needing to reel in any inclination toward complacency.
“It’s a nice thing to have it reversed,” sixth-year senior defensive lineman Sam Burt said with a laugh on Wednesday. “It’s a great thing, I’ll say that.”
Especially since Burt knows this: In the never-ending quest to improve daily, Leipold and his staff will demand more now. And Burt says it’s “super-vital” they don’t let up.
In fact, strength and conditioning coach Matt Gildersleeve got right to it addressing the team early in the week:
Are you going to say “we’ve got it” and set your alarm clock later since beating West Virginia? Will you set it the same time as last week, figuring “what we did last week will be good enough?” Or did you set it 15 minutes earlier now and figure, “what we did last week wasn’t good enough, and it ain’t going to beat Houston.”
From the reactions he saw, Gildersleeve reckoned a few recognized themselves and thought, “Whoa, I did set my alarm later.”
Not anymore, he expects.
That very expectation helps tell the story of how far KU has come since Leipold and his staff took over after the Les Miles fiasco came to a merciful end 18 months ago.
Finally, with then-new athletic director Travis Goff, Kansas got it right.
That also helps explain why we can figure the Jayhawks will continue to improve even if that doesn’t exactly assure a long winning streak upcoming in the gnarly Big 12 for a program still in its embryonic phase.
The change, Burt said, has been akin to “rewiring our brain.”
“There’s no gray; it’s all black and white, all pointed towards winning,” Burt said, later adding, “All the small details, all the small things, matter. And all of those lead up to victories.
“That’s how we think now, and it wasn’t like that before.”
That starts with something fundamental in more ways than one.
For starters, order has emerged out of the prevailing chaos of recent regimes and all the flux in KU football. That’s been engaged by the coaching staff, yes, but also because returning players yearned for structure and discipline.
Since the day they arrived, Gildersleeve said, there has been a “phenomenal” embrace of a sweeping cultural shift.
Even when many players didn’t quite understand why, most accepted the how … and have since come to put those together.
Case in point: A year ago, running back Daniel Hishaw Jr. wondered why he needed to check off on his own that he had entered KU’s practice facility “even though there’s people who see you coming in the building, checking you off.”
Now, he sees that as “self-accountability,” part of an elaborate grading system about attitude and behavior (including academic commitments) that the entire team sees in a PowerPoint presentation every week. “Peersuasion,” Gildersleeve calls the point system categorized by the top-billing of relentless, second-tier of consistent and the bottom of, oof, resistant. The spectrum of the measures Gildersleeve “absolutely” believes correlates on the field has changed dramatically from a year ago; the typical grades making up the middle ground then are the bottom scores now.
And make no mistake: Players are quite cognizant of where they stand and why it matters.
“If you’re on the bad list, it’s called resisting,” Hishaw said. “Everybody sees it. You can’t hide … You want to get off it and be seen as reliable.”
Miss checking a box off the field, Burt said, and maybe you’re more apt to miss a check on the field.
“So it all comes back together,” he said.
That speaks to a welcome focus on detail and discipline, which are particularly crucial equalizers for a program that simply doesn’t have the talent level of most of its opponents.
“Truly there is a reason why for every single thing,” Gildersleeve said. “There’s nothing that we just do by default in this program. There’s no such thing as a default setting with Kansas football. Everything is intentional.”
The impact of that began showing up last season, including in KU’s overtime upset at Texas.
We all remember the spectacular 57-56 overtime win in Austin and the exclamation point of walk-on Jared Casey scoring the winning points against the Longhorns.
So it’s easy to forget that KU’s touchdown to set up that conversion was helped by a half-the distance-to-the-goal unsportsmanlike conduct penalty against Texas receiver Marcus Washington for spinning the ball in celebration.
Ever since he’d seen a player do just that in a practice, Leipold had harped on Kansas players never to do the same. The Texas play made for a nice visual aid to back up the reason. And it reflects why Leipold is zealous about all the little things that make the big things happen.
“If you follow him around practice, he’s going to be screaming at guys 79 times about tucking the ball, and how we tuck the ball and where we tuck the ball,” said Gildersleeve, such a proponent of Leipold’s virtues that he keeps notes on him.
“My point is there’s no detail too small to him. That’s the way we talk. Everything matters. Every single thing matters.”
While “process” has been the brick and mortar of this initial turnaround at Kansas, that’s also been animated by the conviction and confidence that comes with it.
Presumably, that begins to perpetuate itself with realizations like the one Hishaw has had: “It’s actually working.”
The win at West Virginia provided some great examples of that. KU trailed 14-0 in the first quarter and spent much of the first half down two touchdowns, with the defense flailing at the Mountaineers.
A year ago with a game getting away from them, defensive coordinator Brian Borland said Wednesday, there “wasn’t any coming back.”
But Kansas scored with 29 seconds left in the second quarter to cut the lead to 28-21, and KU bristled in overtime after allowing West Virginia to rally from a 42-31 deficit in the final minutes.
“There were so many moments in that game that you very easily could have gone, ‘It’s just not going our way; it’s just not meant to be,’ ” Gildersleeve said. “And the guys just kept on going. And, honestly, that’s such a good example of just what they’ve been like since the day we got here.”
In the bigger-picture sense of a program so long in distress, coaching resilience is one thing. But …
“The best indicator and the best test,” offensive coordinator Andy Kotelnicki said, “is when it actually happens in games, right?”
So far, so good, in ways no one could have forecast to this point.
But, already, that was then and this is now. What’s happened so far will mean much less if Kansas doesn’t continue to progress.
Just like the game within the games, as Borland put it about West Virginia but applies going forward: “It’s the next play,” he said. “It’s the next play. It’s the next play.”
