Kansas football’s offseason work has shown up in the weight room, on the GPS numbers and, maybe most of all, in the way Trey Lathan has carried himself since arriving in Lawrence.
Matt Gildersleeve, the Jayhawks’ director of sports performance, said the senior linebacker has impressed him not just with physical gains, but with the leadership he’s brought over the past six months. Lathan came to KU from West Virginia ahead of the 2025 season at about 217 pounds and running just under 20 miles per hour. Now, Gildersleeve said, he’s added weight and is running nearly 21 miles per hour.
That kind of progress has been a theme as Kansas moved through fall camp this month. Gildersleeve pointed to several other players who have changed their bodies since arriving on campus, including senior linebacker Jibreel Al-Amin, who has added 20 pounds since transferring from Marshall. Senior wide receiver Nik McMillan, a transfer from Buffalo, is up to 195 pounds from 179, and junior running back Dylan Edwards has climbed to 175 after being much closer to 160.
The bigger picture, Gildersleeve said, is that Kansas made a deliberate push toward size and speed as it mapped out its 2026 goals. The offseason plan was built to give players room to improve in both areas, and the results are visible.
The defensive line is averaging 11 pounds more than it did last year, with junior defensive end Leroy Harris III up to about 270 pounds and still capable of running 21.6 miles per hour. The offensive line is nine pounds heavier on average than it was a year ago.
The speed gains are even more striking. At the end of last summer, Kansas had three players who could top 22 miles per hour.
Now it has 11. The number of players at 21 miles per hour or faster has gone from 15 to 39, and the number at 20 miles per hour or faster has jumped from 47 to 62.
Gildersleeve said the staff saw flashes of speed last season from players such as eventual NFL draft pick Emmanuel Henderson Jr., and that convinced them they needed more athletes with that kind of burst in 2026. In the secondary, that meant targeting both size and speed. The average safety is 204 pounds this year, up from 194 last year, and the average cornerback is 191 pounds, up from 184.
A big part of the progress, Gildersleeve said, came from a more detailed approach to transfer-portal additions. Kansas put a more intensive process in place before training even began, spending more time learning about incoming players and their bodies. By that point, Gildersleeve believed the Jayhawks were three-to-four weeks ahead of where they had been a year earlier.
That process included KU health screenings, reports from a player’s previous school and sit-down conversations with Gildersleeve. The staff also worked to gather information from people who had coached or worked with those players before.
Gildersleeve said it was a demanding process, even for him, but one he would do again. By January, the added comfort level with the newcomers - physically and culturally - made the effort worthwhile, especially as Kansas brought back a number of returners, too.
He also noted that it isn’t always easy to get a full picture of a player’s injury history, sometimes because not everything is disclosed. That’s why the layers matter, from KU’s screenings and weight room analysis to those one-on-one conversations. Even injuries from high school can matter in the evaluation.
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