Is Kansas Football about to be looking for a new offensive coordinator?
Ask a Kansas Jayhawks fan to name the most important guys on the offense this season in football, and you can expect to get multiple players, including Jason Bean, Devin Neal, Mason Fairchild and plenty of others. But there is one guy that absolutely deserves a huge portion of that credit: Offensive Coordinator Andy Kotelnicki. He has been wildly credited with the resurgence of the Kansas offense and the flexibility to be able to roll through so many injuries to key players and still improve. There have been numerous articles about how complete the transformation has been at Kansas with him leading the offense.
But all of that might be changing soon. Rumors and reports have connected Kotelnicki to pretty much every open offensive coordinator job in the nation:
While the Oklahoma job has since been filled, there are still plenty of other jobs that will open up. And the report of the Penn State opening is a bit concerning. Based on what I have been hearing, it seems like there is legitimate interest, that Kansas has been preparing for this sort of situation, and that they aren't going to let him go for a lateral move without a fight to keep him.
It was mentioned in a few areas back when Bill Self's lifetime contract was reworked that Kansas was doing this as much to reward Self as it was to make it possible to pay Leipold AND his staff more in contract renegotiations. As much synergy as there is in the athletic department, the optics of the best active head coach at a clear basketball school making less than the football coach would likely be untenable.
To be clear, we are not at the point yet where you should be panicking as a fan. While there might be interest, any discussions are very preliminary and will take some time to wrap up. And if he does move on for another position, we should all have confidence that Leipold can fill the whole on his staff just like any of the positions they plugged on the field with the transfer portal. But if you were ever going to pick someone to turn down a perceived promotion to a better program in favor of the current position, it's hard to imagine that someone other than Kotelnicki in this position would be more likely.
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