There isn’t a lot moving on the Kansas front today, but there are still a few Jayhawk-related items worth noting.
On the volleyball side, Kansas bounced back at home Tuesday night with a sweep of Wichita State after a rough weekend stretch. The Jayhawks dropped a five-set match to Florida State on Friday, and that road trip also included losses to Pittsburgh and Stanford.
Against Wichita State, Kansas took control early in the first set and never really let go, finishing that opening frame with 13 kills to Wichita State’s six. The tone looked different, too - the Jayhawks played with more ease and confidence than they had over the weekend.
There’s also a note on Andy Kotelnicki’s return to the Jayhawks from The Daily Kansan. Leipold said Kotelnicki’s comeback was essentially a fresh start, but he quickly built a connection with this year’s players and got his offensive ideas across in those early meetings.
Redshirt sophomore quarterback Isaiah Marshall echoed that after Friday’s game, saying, “The meetings we have, he always has the offense engaged,” redshirt sophomore quarterback Isaiah Marshall said in a postgame interview on Friday. “I feel like he’s [taken] time to have a talk with everybody on the offense.”
Elsewhere in the college football world, Missouri has a couple of players worth watching heading into this weekend’s Border War. SI reported that left tackle Cayden Green practiced yesterday and is expected to return against KU, while running back Ahmad Hardy is still more of a question mark. Hardy has no timetable yet for a full recovery from a gunshot wound he suffered this offseason.
The rest of the day’s reading veers into the wonderfully messy state of the sport itself.
One old-school blog post at Bring Your Champions, They’re Our Meat takes a hard look at modern college football, arguing that while the sport corrected its “original sin” by allowing players to get paid, it now feels “grim and unrecognizable.” The piece also describes a landscape full of legal chaos, conference wreckage, and constant lawsuits.
And speaking of legal trouble, the SEC was/is threatening to kick LSU out of the SEC. The league said, “The SEC and its member universities have the right to establish, through agreed-upon governance procedures, the rules under which they voluntarily compete and to expect those rules to be followed,” the SEC said in a statement.
“A commitment to those rules, and to the core principles of the Southeastern Conference, is an essential element of SEC membership.” It appears as though Kiffen and LSU backed down as they did not add any former NFL guys to their roster.
There was also a strange one out in Florida State’s Labor Day night matchup with SMU. The game was delayed 90 minutes after a power surge in the stadium caused a transformer to burst and trigger an outage. When play finally began, the teams still didn’t have helmet communications, sideline tablets or scoreboards.
But the weekend’s strangest finish may have come in Ann Arbor. Michigan beat Western Michigan 13-12 on Bryce Underwood’s Hail Mary touchdown pass after the replay official put one second back on the clock.
The stadium clock and the television feed both showed zeros after Underwood’s first Hail Mary was thrown out the back of the end zone. In a letter sent Tuesday, MAC commissioner Jon A.
Steinbrecher said “replay protocol was not properly followed” at the conclusion of the game.
One final college football piece, from The Action Cookbook, gets at the double-edged reality of the sport right now. The author says the shift toward player compensation was necessary and long overdue, but it has also created a world of constant movement that makes it harder for fans to keep track of their teams from year to year.
In Other News...
Kansas Fans Suddenly Have A Real Reason To Watch Melvin Council Jr
Melvin Council Jr. is back in the spotlight for a reason Kansas fans have not had to think about much since his playing days ended. The former Jayhawk has turned to the legal system in Monroe County, New York, after a dispute over how his junior college time should count against his NCAA eligibility, with his complaint arguing he has only logged three years of college basketball and should be granted one more.
For Kansas followers, the case matters because Councils path to campus was never ordinary. He had previously been exonerated of criminal charges that once complicated both his recruitment and his eligibility, and now the question is whether the NCAA will recognize his junior college seasons in the same way Councils camp sees them. If the challenge succeeds, it could reopen a door he and his supporters thought was closed. [Read more 🡒]
Kansas O-Line Depth Is Suddenly Putting One Rising Jayhawk In Focus
Summer camp has a way of reshuffling a depth chart before anyone gets too comfortable, and DeAndre Harper has become one of the more interesting names in that mix for Kansas. The transfer from Northwest Missouri State has stood out along the offensive line, enough to put him in the conversation as the Jayhawks continue sorting through their options ahead of a demanding stretch on the schedule.
Head coach Lance Leipold noticed the growth after Kansas opened the season with a win over LIU, pointing to Harpers work ethic and steady improvement. Even with that rise, the next step is still the tricky one, since the Jayhawks are staring at a tougher run that includes the Border Showdown with Missouri and a clearer picture of where Harper fits when the games start to tighten. [Read more 🡒]
Kansas Offense Is Taking On An Identity Defenses May Hate
Andy Kotelnicki has wasted little time putting his stamp on Kansas, and the early signs point to an offense built to keep defenses guessing. The approach is rooted in personnel, not a rigid scheme, with versatility, physicality and unpredictability all shaping the way the Jayhawks want to play. Lance Leipold said the installation moved quickly after Kotelnicki returned, a reminder that this has been a from-the-ground-up project rather than a few tweaks layered onto the old system.
The early returns have been hard to ignore, even before the playbook is fully in place. Kansas piled up more than 600 yards of offense in the opener, a number that suggests the ceiling here could be real if the pieces keep fitting together. The bigger question now is how quickly that identity hardens into something opponents have to spend all week trying to solve, because the version taking shape already looks like one defenses may not enjoy seeing again. [Read more 🡒]