What Lance Leipold Said After Kansas Fell to Utah at Home

Kansas football officially finished 5-7 for the second consecutive year after falling to Utah in the regular season finale. The Jayhawks led by four at one point and had an opportunity to extend their lead in the red zone, but untimely interceptions from Jalon Daniels became the story of the game.

Since KU did not clinch a bowl, it was the final game of the season for the Jayhawks and the last collegiate appearance for longtime contributors like Daniels. During head coach Lance Leipold's postgame press conference, he took responsibility for another subpar season and touched on a number of topics.

On his team's performance:

"Obviously, as a team, we didn't play well enough to win the football game. I thought we had some outstanding efforts. Lots of times, after you've struggled a little bit like we have down the stretch, you want to make sure guys come out and strain and play hard. I thought we did that. We had some opportunities to win this football game; there's no doubt about that. And I thought we played extremely well on defense, except for a couple big plays. We ran the ball extremely well today. Unfortunately, turned the ball over too much. We're moving in a good situation, and we're going to kick a field goal. We make it, and we get a penalty; we miss [the second attempt]. Just too many things that when we're playing a ranked football team, you can't have those type of things happen and hope to win the football game, because then you're getting the hole late."

On what he thought about Jalon Daniels:

"I'll just say this holistically, it wasn't Jalon Daniels' best game, which is very unfortunate, his last game as a Jayhawk. I don't think he ever felt fully in rhythm. I think there were times where he had a look about him that he knew he wasn't in great rhythm. There were times when in the RPO game, he decided to throw and do some things. Obviously didn't see people sometimes, and then he's trying to scramble and just get rid of it. You got to make sure that it's clearly out of bounds."

On what he thought about this team:

"First of all, it's been a really fun group to coach. It's a good group of guys. In this portal era now, as we've talked many times, when you integrate as many older players as what happens and what we did. To me, you're worried about how it's going to flow, and is everybody going to get on the same page sooner as far as expectations of the program and how we do things and why we do things. I've told this group, it's gone a lot better than I ever imagined in that regard. Now on the field, obviously, we came up short in some games that were winnable, and obviously we're going to continue to look at that.

On how he views outside expectations:

"With mixed emotions. Mixed in the fact that where we've come as a program that in a very short period of time, has now become the expectation. How we have to continue to look at every aspect of our program in this era of roster building and things like that and how we're going to continue to do that to give ourselves the best opportunities possible. But as far as two 5-7 years, we've underachieved, by most people's standards."

On players' reaction to fan dissatisfaction:

"I want our players to be confident enough that we should be able to be a team now playing bowl games. That's what we want them to be. That's what we want them to aspire to be, and that's what we have to keep working to obtain. As we continue to do coaching, weight room, everything that we're doing, we have to make sure that it's an all the time thing. If we're going to continue to move our program, it has to be 24/7, 365 in what we do. With the parity that is happening in college football, the margin for error for teams like us continues to be fairly small.

All quotes transcribed from 247 Sports.