You want unbelievable? Kansas is 5-0 – in football

LAWRENCE, Kan. – Kansas made three first downs in the second half Saturday. And won.

In the fourth quarter alone, clinging to a three-point lead, Kansas committed a turnover and three penalties, ran nine plays for minus-8 yards, and won.

“I’m sitting there going, ‘How many times are we going to eff this thing up?’ ” Kansas coach Lance Leipold said after the game, the wonder evident in his voice.

If you think it’s unbelievable Kansas found a way to beat Iowa State 14-11, that’s nothing. You want unbelievable? The Jayhawks are 5-0. In football. A Kansas program that won five games in the past three years combined, that hasn’t won five games in a season since 2009, has won five games. And lost none.

“I think anybody’s lying if they tell you anybody expected this a couple of weeks into the season,” athletic director Travis Goff said.

Football is alive and well on the campus of the current NCAA men’s basketball champion. David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium sold out for the second consecutive Saturday, and Goff didn’t even have to tweet out a flash sale for the last 500 tickets at $15 apiece. Goff did that for the Duke game on September 24 so Kansas could have its first sellout in three years. And the last sellout, in 2019, came with an asterisk: About a third of the tickets that day were bought by K-State fans.

This announced crowd of 47,233 stayed until the end, praying and braying as Iowa State methodically drove into range for the tying field goal in the closing seconds. Iowa State coach Matt Campbell, facing a fourth-and-less-than-1 at Kansas’ 20, chose to put the game on the foot of freshman Jace Gilbert. He came into the game 5-of-5 but had gone 1-of-3 Saturday, banging attempts of 38 and 45 yards high off the right upright.

Gilbert didn’t do that on the 37-yarder he attempted with 27 seconds to play. He hooked it hard left.

Iowa State ran 78 plays to Kansas’s 46, gained exactly 100 more yards (313-213), held the ball for 35 minutes, and lost.

“There are a lot of different ways that a team that doesn’t have a lot of confidence would have folded,” Leipold said.

What the Jayhawks lacked in efficiency Saturday they more than made up for in confidence, and belief, and will, and all those other positive traits that Leipold has nurtured during his 16 months in charge. “I don’t know if this team could have done anything like that a year ago,” Leipold said.

Kansas took a chance on Leipold

Kansas hired Leipold on April 30 of last year, after spring practice, and – more to the point – after firing Les Miles when details of an investigation into his alleged sexual misconduct at LSU in 2013 became public. The 12-1 season in 2007 under coach Mark Mangino may as well have been in 1907.

Goff took a chance that Leipold, a guy who won six D-III national championships at Wisconsin-Whitewater and two MAC division titles at Buffalo, could win in Lawrence.

“All real. All substance,” Goff said, describing his coach. “Has this connection to his roots, small-town Wisconsin, that keeps him grounded. Keeps him present. I don’t know that everybody has those attributes, frankly. Let’s face it. Not everybody does. His attention to detail and his day-to-day commitment to improvement and development, it’s happening differently right now in this program.”

Leipold took a chance on Kansas because he was nearing 60 years old and wanted a chance at the Power 5 in the worst way. That’s exactly what he got. Once he got to Kansas and got his bearings, he found something that inspired him. More to the point, someone, a lot of someones, on the “Hawks and Highways” tour of the state he took with Goff and university chancellor Dr. Doug Girod.

“It was amazing to me to hear people talk about how long they’ve had season tickets and how long they’ve still been faithfully coming,” Leipold said. “… It almost to me became more of an obligation to give them something for their patience and loyalty. I really haven’t experienced that at some of the other places I’ve worked.”

When you work your way through Wisconsin-Whitewater and Nebraska-Omaha and Buffalo, you see they don’t have a lot of fans. When you work three years (2001-03) at Nebraska for Frank Solich, you see they don’t have a lot of patience.

Leipold and the Jayhawks gave their fans hope last season, even as they went 2-10. In the first half of the season, they got run over. Iowa State beat them 59-7. Two weeks later, Kansas made Oklahoma fight to win 35-23. And a fuse lit in the locker room. The players began to see results.

The fans began to see improvement. In the 10^th game of the year, Kansas won at Texas 57-56, going for two and the win in the first overtime.

Hearing the fans, Leipold said, “You thought 2-10 was 10-2 sometime, just because of the Texas win.”

Leipold has molded quarterback Jalon Daniels into one of the top quarterbacks in the nation. He didn’t play well Saturday, throwing and rushing for 102 yards when he had been averaging 302 yards per game this season. He overthrew two open receivers in the end zone Saturday, and as he described his mistakes in the news conference, he couldn’t wipe the smile off his face.

“We definitely had some adversity today as an offense,” Daniels said. “To be able to see the defense come through when we needed them, we love that.”

During the game, Daniels and a couple of teammates cast an eye toward the stands, the fans cheering, the KU band pumping out Earth, Wind & Fire. It felt like college football.

“It’s been a minute since we had a crowd like that,” Daniels said. “Just taking it all in, feeding off all the energy they brought.”

KU football a hot commodity

The athletic department has added 20 new points of sale around the stadium since the season began. Booker borrowed four merchandise stands from the Kansas City Royals, where he used to work. There are seven different Kansas football T-shirts for sale, not to mention the NIL swag of players like Daniels and tailback Devin Neal.

They added a “Happy Hour,” cutting prices on hot dogs, popcorn, soda and beer from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. so fans would come into the stadium. When the place isn’t even half-filled, you can waltz in five minutes before kickoff, grab a drink and go sit down.

“Now, the game is the show,” deputy athletic director Jason Booker said. “That’s one thing I noticed last week. About an hour before kickoff, they were saying, ‘Hey, we gotta start heading in.’ That’s different. They don’t want to miss the pregame. They don’t want to miss kickoff. It used to be tailgate, tailgate, I might come in in the first quarter at some point.”

Last week, when Kansas beat Duke 35-27, concession sales doubled their previous high and merchandise sales tripled theirs.

At a pregame tailgate, Dave Fowle, the chair of the geology department, said, “I got hired here. We won the Orange Bowl the next year. I thought we were a football school. We weren’t.”

Last season, he bought 25 tickets for a tailgate for the Kansas State game. He ended up giving away 10. On Saturday, he needed 40. Kevin O’Malley, the local Budweiser distributor and an athletic department sponsor, said that in recent years the athletic department would call him and tell him they were sending over 50 to 100 tickets to give away.

“I’ll tell you how bad it was,” O’Malley said. “We used to have eight season tickets. We gave four of them up. Couldn’t get rid of them. I’m going into the bars, all the restaurants. They just said, ‘Don’t want to go.’ Now that football’s hot, it’s going to be hard to get them back.”

Those are the problems you want, as is raising money to modernize the stadium. which resembles Ohio State’s Horseshoe, though perhaps for a smaller horse. Goff said the athletic department is days away from hiring an architect and commissioning an economic impact study. He plans for construction to begin next year.

Neal, who rushed for 75 yards on 12 carries Saturday, is a Lawrence native who has been coming to the stadium since childhood. “Honestly, throughout high school I always thought about selling this place out,” he said after the game. “Coming here to complete my dream and turn this thing around. I always thought this was going to happen eventually.”

No one is confusing Kansas with a Big 12 contender. As Leipold said, “You can still look across the field. We don’t look like other teams yet.” But it’s happening at Kansas. Man, is it ever. Undefeated TCU comes to the Booth next Saturday, and ESPN College GameDay is coming, too. Odds are you can make that three consecutive sellouts.

By the way, “Late Night at the Phog,” the official start of basketball season, is October 14 at midnight. On campus, that’s better known as the night before the Oklahoma game.

“The crazy thing is the basketball team is the national champion and they’re not even being talked about,” Jayhawks fan Derek Haglund said. “This is how college football should be. It hasn’t been like this since Mangino. I had hair back then.”

Haglund is hopeful that Kansas will be ranked this week.

“We see what it was. We see what it is,” he said. “What can it be?”