KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A conversation with Kansas football coach Lance Leipold is 15 minutes old, most of it rehashing a recently completed breakthrough season, when the topic turns to the man most responsible for it. He is sitting behind a desk, a mural of KU players decorating the windows over his shoulder and a pair of oversized white, red and blue Adidas shoes stashed on the table in front.
“But this shouldn’t be about me,” Leipold interrupts. “It’s about the program.”
Except it is about the head coach, because you can’t tell the story of this program’s sudden, if not unexpected, resurgence without telling the story of its head coach. After all, others have sat in this very office — same chair, same desk, same backdrop — only to take part in a much different conversation. And at a much different time of year.
This isn’t an obligatory let’s-check-in-on-Kansas interview in late August. This is early January, days before Leipold’s players even return from winter break, and we’re sitting one mile from Allen Fieldhouse and talking football.
To understand how this happened — and where it’s yet going — of course it requires an understanding of the man in charge. That story actually tracks to the late 1990s, when Leipold landed what he calls his first true full-time coaching gig at a school that doesn’t even play football anymore. He was an assistant at Nebraska-Omaha, and the team won all of one game in a season. A year later, though, it won three. Another year later, it was 10-2.
In the debate of nature versus nurture, that experience ingrained something within Leipold — something that drew him to this office chair in Lawrence, Kansas — and it’s the same reasons others probably wouldn’t even think of taking this job. At least one friend, by the way, warned him he would kill his career if he took it.
“I found that to be some of the most rewarding time of my coaching career,” Leipold says of his Nebraska-Omaha stint. “To find that same type of thing as a head coach is always something I’ve been striving to do.”
This has been two decades in the making, in that sense. The obvious challenge at Kansas — namely, a program that had won nine games in six seasons before Leipold arrived — turned away others and seemed like the open door he’d always been waiting to invite him in. Inviting him to stay, too, and we’ll get to that shortly.
The relevance now is that Leipold, after a 6-7 season that included the school’s first appearance in a bowl game in 14 years, feels like this process is only part of the way there. From the outside looking in, there has been such a significant step forward that it feels large enough to reach some sort of finish line. That’s not me talking — it’s his interactions with the most devoted fans.
Before he’d coached a game in Lawrence, for instance, Leipold joined athletic director Travis Goff for a tour of the state, hoping to re-brand Kansas football. He’d meet fans who said they had been season-ticket holders since the 1990s, and a handful since the late 1970s. Leipold would ask about their recent connections with the program, and the answer was nearly universal — the memory of a game that occurred more than a decade earlier.
“I don’t know how big that (2008) Orange Bowl stadium was, but there must’ve been 200,000 people there,” Leipold says. “Because everyone I’ve ever met here was at that game.
“But that was the last thing they could really cling to.”
And his interactions now?
“I’ll be walking to a haircut — believe it or not,” he says, referring to the few strands remaining on his head. “And somebody would stop me on the street and just say thank you. They’d thank me for what our program did this year. Or for staying — not that we were ever going anywhere. Or had an offer to go anywhere.”
And you can almost feel a wink that never actually comes.
But if you had some knowledge of his past — or why he was here in the first place — his nonchalance falls into place. He won Division III national titles at Wisconsin-Whitewater, was rebuffed by a Division I program 90 miles away, took a job across time zones, built it to a top-25 team and then ... left ... for ... Lawrence?
“I wanted to take a swing at doing something that people didn’t think could be done,” Leipold said.
Which plays into where KU is headed. Or where they could be headed. It hasn’t been done. The challenge wasn’t to make Kansas, as he put it, “a barely average football team,” but to actually follow-through on replicating the experience of his first gig.
And to that end, there’s more to go. A lot more to go.
He’s steadfast in not promising — or even offering a remote prediction — for any results. He is married to the process, a believer that, “to keep ourselves competitive, we have to be good at the details.”
He corrects himself: “We have to be great at the details.”
It’s the details that will drive the next steps, he believes, because it’s the details that probably have the most growing to do.
Make no mistake, the results have attracted attention, and from all of the right places. A pair of local kids flipped their commitments to Kansas after digesting the Jayhawks’ success — Jaden Hamm, a defensive back from Eudora, had originally committed to Arkansas, who beat KU in the bowl game in a triple-overtime thriller; and offensive tackle Calvin Clements, a local kid, had committed to Baylor.
But if you’re looking for signs that this isn’t a team ready to rest on its successes, the to-do list is a good indicator. It’s quite lengthy. And very little of it is about the X’s and O’s. Most of it will occur outside a stadium, away from a football field.
The practice facility needs to be revamped and supplemented, he begins. A better stadium, which is already in the works. A player lounge. New coaching offices. Upgrades to the weight room. A player lounge. A nutrition station. And on he goes.
He rattles these off as though they’ve been rattled off before.
“I’ve got some big games coming up in the next seven months,” he says. “And that’s to get this place looking better.”
And, oh yeah, the players returned this week. It’s quasi-football season again, at least if you ask those in this building. And what’s different is it feels like it.
He hopes.
KU has a large portion of its core returning, most notably quarterback Jalon Daniels, who appeared so intent on returning that he dubbed his announcement, “So stop asking.”
Hey, to be fair, we’re still getting used to these kinds of developments here. Some things have changed.
The point is more things still will.
“We should be (with more) intent, more spirited, more optimistic,” Leipold says. “But at the same time, it better just be head down and let’s go. That’s the part I hope. We still got more work to do. Everyone else is working. Plenty of work to do.”
