Big Developments Off the Field: 96 Days Until Kansas Football
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As great as last season was for the Kansas Jayhawks on the field, as they used a quick start to bank some wins and then made their first bowl game since 2009, they had just as big of a year off the field as well. From College Gameday coming to campus to staff additions to huge investments in the program, there are a ton of things to hit on. But here are the biggest three from the end of the season to Spring Football.
Extension of Lance Leipold's Contract
Coming into the Travis Goff era, the big question was whether the Kansas Jayhawks would be willing to put up the amount of resources needed to rebuild the football program to where it needed to be. Just a few months after he took the job, Oklahoma and Texas shocked the college world by announcing a move to the SEC. Realignment rumors were flying, and it quickly became apparent that the newly-hired Lance Leipold would need to be able to bring the program back to respectability if the Jayhawks didn't want to be left behind.
But no matter how confident fans were about the ability of Leipold or the commitment that Goff made to fix football, those were promises that had been made multiple times in the past decade but had never panned out. The biggest investments seemed to be in paying buyouts for another failed head coach. A stadium project under Sheahon Zenger collapsed due to lack of funding. David Beaty's contract was structured in a way to save money after Charlie Weis, but it was extended to pay Beaty an amount that made it difficult to move on from him.
The process was expected to be slow. And Kansas expected to have time to figure out the next steps of that investment. But strides in Year 1 were built on in Year 2, and the extra attention made Liepold an attractive candidate for openings at Nebraska and Wisconsin. Many fans were concerned about the likelihood of him leaving.
But Goff was able to craft an extension for Leipold late in the season to keep the coach in Lawrence for the foreseeable future. It calmed a lot of the fears for Kansas fans, and showed just how committed the athletic department was to the program.
Stadium Improvements
The rumors of stadium improvements have been flying around for over a year, but they have been very vague. But the signing of Leipold's new contract included some details about the type of progress that needed to be made on those improvements, and we recently received an update on the tentative plans from Mike Vernon's The KU Hearings. While it is entirely possible that not all of the details here will be included, there is enough there to confirm that there is a huge investment going on.
These types of improvements will be huge for the fans and players alike.
Keeping Jason Bean (and other key players)
Despite some of the opinions running around the internet at the end of the Liberty Bowl, Jason Bean deciding to come back to Kansas was a huge win for this program. As Kyle will jump into in the next couple of days, getting Bean back as the backup quarterback gives Kansas a lot of options, and quite a bit of the Kansas production is returning.
It seemed late in the season that Bean was one of the players that would be moving on. But Bean is the best example of the players that will continue to help this team build on it's momentum from the last few years. We'll jump into just how important it is throughout the countdown, but it's awesome to see just how much the players are bought in.
There are plenty of other great stories from the offseason, and tomorrow we'll jump into the big takeaways from spring practices before diving into the roster.
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