Kansas spent the offseason trying to get ahead of its own learning curve.
For strength coach Matt Gildersleeve, that meant reworking the way the Jayhawks welcomed in a massive transfer class. After last year’s offseason, he decided the program had waited too long to really understand the new players in the building.
“I would do it tenfold over again,” he said.
That reflection came after KU’s 2025 season, when Gildersleeve - the school’s longtime director of sports performance - looked back on the first offseason in Lance Leipold’s tenure with such a large wave of transfer additions. The problem, in his eyes, was simple: too much of the early training block was spent learning basic but crucial information about the athletes.
“You’re two weeks into training, you’re learning these things about these guys’ bodies and whatever it may be,” he said. “You don’t have two weeks to waste.”
So this time around, he changed the process.
Before KU’s more than 30 transfers even began training in January, they had already gone through screenings with the strength and training staffs. They also sat down one-on-one with Gildersleeve for 30 minutes apiece to talk about “their personal goals, their ambitions, their whys, what they wanted to do.” On top of that, Gildersleeve and his staff gathered injury histories and connected with strength coaches from each player’s previous school.
It was a lot of work, and Gildersleeve didn’t pretend otherwise. But he said the payoff was real, estimating the process saved KU three or four weeks of productivity. That mattered even more because the Jayhawks stretched their offseason out by about six weeks overall, pushing back the start of spring football for longer winter workouts and beginning their regular season nearly two weeks later.
The end result, Gildersleeve said, is a team that looks very different from a year ago.
“We’re a much-different-looking football team than we’ve ever been, but especially when you look at it from a year ago,” he said.
He backed that up Wednesday with numbers, even bringing printed stats to the podium. KU’s speed profile has jumped across the board: the number of players running at least 22 mph rose from three to 11, those at 21 mph climbed from 15 to 39, and those at 20 mph increased from 47 to 62. The team’s average speed also moved from 19 to 20.23.
The physical changes show up elsewhere, too. KU’s defensive line is 11 pounds heavier on average than it was in 2025, while the offensive line has added nine pounds on average.
At the skill positions, projected impact players such as running back Dylan Edwards, a transfer from Kansas State, and Nik McMillan from Buffalo have each put on about 15 pounds. Georgia Tech safety Christian Pritchett, already among the fastest players on the roster at 22.64 mph, has added 10 pounds and improved his vertical jump by 6 inches.
Gildersleeve was careful not to confuse the weight room with the finish line. The point, as he likes to remind people, is football.
Still, the extra work in onboarding appears to have helped KU avoid one of the biggest headaches that can come with transfers: hidden medical history. Getting players to fully open up about injuries is never easy, he said, because plenty of them want to arrive and make a strong first impression.
“Guys want to come in and they want to start off right, so there’s a lot of things, like, they don’t want to disclose everything, whatever it may be,” he said, “but if you had a right knee patellar tendinopathy in high school, I want to know about it, because it does make a difference in what we’re thinking about how we’re going to train you.”
That’s why KU built what Gildersleeve called four “layers” of onboarding: the two screenings, the meeting with him and the call to the previous school’s coach. The goal was to catch the issues before they became setbacks.
“If a player has an issue with his L3 vertebra,” he said, “that’s awesome to know, instead of the first day he comes back and I put a bar on his back and all of a sudden his lower back hurts for two weeks and we lose two weeks of training.
“That didn’t happen this year.”
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Kansas Just Took A Painful Hit At Linebacker Ahead Of 2026
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