Lance Leipold details rebuild approach at Kansas after successful season

Lance Leipold knew Kansas would be a big rebuild but created major buzz last season leading the Jayhawks to the Liberty Bowl. It’s going to take more work to keep it up in the Big 12. But he’s not going to change his approach to speed up the process.

The methodical approach could pay off big time down the line for Leipold and Kansas.

“It’s been exciting you know, but I think at the forefront we’re still a sub .500 football team and it shows kind of where this thing was at,” Leipold said on Sirius XM College Sports Radio. “Our biggest thing first of all is we’ve always wanted to build something for consistency, not just for a quick splash and that’s why this year is going to be so important to us. When you meet with a group of guys who have been down and out and they’re there, meet a new coach in May and there’s all these things going on, you want to make sure everybody’s got their theories of how to build a program and we know that there’s ways to change it and flip rosters and situations quicker than ever before.”

Leipold doubled down on his personal approach to program building at Kansas. He’s 8-17 at Kansas but went from a bare cupboard (two wins in 2021) to bowl eligibility right away.

“But I always felt that for our players, they’re all going to be given an opportunity to show what they can do and we wanted to try to do it with as many people that were currently on the roster,” Leipold said. “So to see things get better and it started towards the end of our first season and 21 from down in Austin to the next week in Fort Worth, and then we played better against West Virginia and to get to start that we did, winning in overtime in Morgantown and then going to Houston to get a win.

“Then to walk back into our stadium, our strength coach Matt Gildersleeve had said after we saw it was sold out. He goes, ‘Can you believe it and how it had happened that quickly?’ That was really a special feeling for our players.”

Kansas fans turned up for a bounce-back season in Lawrence. That didn’t go unnoticed by Leipold.

“I appreciate our fan base, Travis Goff our athletic director, and to be able to do it three consecutive weeks was special,” Leipold said. “Now we’ve got to find a way to make that a regular routine. You mentioned game day, pulling into that as you know, those are things that the city of Lawrence has never seen, I haven’t seen in a long time since Mark Mangino. We’ve just got to make it more common.”