/cue Mr. Brightside
Welcome back to Rock M Nation’s annual opponent preview series of the upcoming season. Each week we will break down one opponent from the schedule in chronological order. Given that rosters are ever fluid – and this is done by a hobbyist rather than a pro – there could be some errors in history and current roster makeup. All mistakes are done on purpose and with ill intent because I don’t like you or your team.
Catch up on previous 2024 opponent previews!
(trigger warning, violent Civil War stuff ahead)
My great-great-great-grandfather, Michael Graham, was 14 when the War Between the States broke out. At that time, he was living with his family (mom, dad, two sisters) in some nondescript piece of land on the Missouri-kansas border. They were self-sustaining farmers – and not very good ones at that – but were doing their best to eke out a reasonable living in open territory.
But that all changed in the winter of 1862.
Sometime after dark the Grahams had a knock at their door among the rustling sounds of a large group mustering around their home. Upon answering the door, a Union soldier in red leggings informed them that Colonel Charles Jennison had decreed that any residents in this area of Missouri were deemed rebel sympathizers and traitors to the country and it was his responsibility to arrest all inhabitants and confiscate their property and land. Of course, this order did not go over well and when Michael’s father protested, he was summarily shot in the head in front of the rest of the family. The remaining Graham clan ran as Jayhawker soldiers seized their belongings and torched their home. For whatever reason Michael, his mother, and his two sisters were able to escape into the cold abyss of the November night as the only life they knew was slowly turned to ashes.
They eventually made it to Blue Springs to find many other Missouri refugee families who shared similar stories of murder and destruction at the hands of Colonel Jennison’s troops. At that same time, in the same city, a 25-year-old teacher-turned Cherokee-trained guerilla fighter named William Clark Quantrill was in the area, rallying young men from the area to join his militia cavalry of Missouri-defending bushwhackers to take the fight back to the Jayhawkers. Michael, at this point a shell of a 17-year-old, took arms with Quantrill’s Raiders as they patrolled the border, hunting down Union regiments adorned with the infamous red legs.
Although the women in the Graham family were not affected, the collapse of the women’s prison in Kansas City in 1863 — a prison where women family members of accused Missouri guerilla fighters were held — enraged Quantrill and his raiders to the point of finally executing their most infamous attack: the Lawrence Massacre. Michael, Quantrill, Frank and Jesse James, “Bloody” Bill Anderson, and hundreds more rode into Lawrence, murdered somewhere around 150 men and boys, and burned that cesspool of a town down to the ground. For years the Jayhawkers boasted that they could muster 500 men at a moment’s notice to deflect any incursion by Missouri soldiers; Quantrill’s Raiders pirated Jayhawk finances, executed the top Jayhawk supporters, and pillaged their base in under four hours with no casualties taken during the raid.
But Michael’s time with Quantrill did not last much longer after that. After the raid, the unit began bickering amongst themselves as to the degree of which they actively fought the kansans and the Union versus protecting Missourians and the land. Michael wound up riding with “Bloody” Bill Anderson to hunt down Jayhawkers for a while but left after a disastrous raid on Columbia left a quarter of Anderson’s charges dead or wounded. Michael and other parts of his militia unit were then folded into General Sterling Price’s Army of Missouri just in time to get overwhelmed and defeated at the Battle of Westport. However, that defeat ultimately spared Michael’s life as he was able to surrender in Kentucky as a Confederate soldier rather than a Missouri bushwhacker, thus escaping the wrathful ire of the Jayhawker soldiers who were actively hunting down and killing anyone they suspected of guerilla activities along the Missouri-kansas border.
That is the story that was told to me about my family’s participation in the Missouri-kansas conflict. I don’t know how much of the story has grown in grandiosity over the generations of storytellers passing it down, but that’s the version I heard. I must admit, that while I am a son of a Confederate veteran, there is very little about their cause that I identify with today. But what I do identify with is the incomparable experience of watching your father murdered and your home burned – for no reason other than your house was in a specific area – and wanting to rectify that injustice. From what we know, the Grahams didn’t own slaves, didn’t have much opinion on slave vs. free states, and never shared their opinion on federal vs. state government. But what we do know is that Michael wanted to kill some kansans because they wanted to kill him and most of the people he knew. And that, out of any other motivation, is certainly something I can understand and defend.
While my emotional investment in sports has waned as I’ve gotten older, there is still one opponent in one sport that I will maintain my irrational hatred for, and that’s Missouri’s opponent in the Border War. Through the many decades of passing down the memories of Michael Graham’s experiences in the Civil War, the main through point – as told by my grandfather to me – was simply this:
“The land of kansas is forever tainted by the actions of its people and those who insist on carrying on its legacy”.
So let’s talk about their stupid football team.
Good lord, kansas, your football teams suck so bad.
I mean, we all kind of knew that they were terrible, but seeing it in graph form really adds an additional, almost pathetic, context to their whole deal.
From the tremendous highs of Mark Magino’s magical fupa taking them to 12-wins and a BCS bowl victory in 2007, to the declining returns of his vocal and physical beatings of players, to the lowest of lows of Turner Gill, Charlie Weis (lmao), David Beatty, and Les Miles, the Jayhawks have been just as impotent on the football field as they have been prolific on the basketball court. All the while, pretending to have moral superiority over Missouri as the Tigers were selected to join the most elite and prestigious college sports conference in the land while the Jayhawks languished in the equivalent of a power-level refugee conference. And don’t think for a second that I don’t see how their argument against continuing the Border War football game was influenced:
“NO, YOU LEFT THAT MEANS YOU QUIT WE WILL NEVER PLAY YOU IN FOOTBALL EVER AGAIN, YOU DISRESPECTFUL HEATHENS!”
versus…
“Mmmmm, yes I suppose we could find a way to enjoy contests on the field of gridiron football…mmmmm”.
What a bunch of f***in’ losers.
Here’s what kansas did last year:
Do you know what it’s like to go 1-5 in one-score games? Of course not, what a preposterous question to ask, we of the enlightened Eli Drinkwitz cult of “69.2% winning percentage in one-score games”.
… but seriously how bad was that 2024 experience, you stupid Jayhawkers?
If I can take off my Missouri hat for a second and put on my “objective stat crunching” hat for a while, yes, the one-score game record was bad, but also this was not a good kansas football team, and certainly a regression from the breakout ‘23 squad. kansas finished 5-7 but even the post-win expectancy numbers see them as a 6-win team, so not much of a difference from what ended up being the true record. Yes, they should have beaten UNLV but they played like total s- – – against TCU and Baylor, were lucky to even be within one score against West Virginia, Arizona State, and Kansas State, and were in essential coin-flip games against Illinois (loss) and BYU (win).
Part of the reason for the overall regression was that the defense – never really great but at its best in ‘23 – became much leakier in explosive play prevention as well as being total push overs in standard downs. But the real reason was the regression of an offense that returned their dynamic quarterback but lost their Offensive Coordinator to Penn State. There were loud rumblings of quarterback Jalon Daniels not actually being able to read defenses and that departed-OC Andy Kotelnicki knew how to scheme around it while new-OC Jeff Grimes did not. And even then, kansas did pull off upsets against three ranked teams in a row, with Iowa State, BYU, and Colorado falling to the Jayhawks over three consecutive weeks in November. Of course, kansas fans will ask you to politely ignore the final game in November, a 45-17 blowout at the hands of Baylor.
Regardless of reason, kansas had a bad 5-7 campaign and are trying to rebuild their receivers and line via portal in hopes that the last season of one of their best quarterbacks doesn’t end with yet another missed postseason.
Coaching Staff
Photo by Kyle Rivas/Getty Images
Lance Leipold – 5th Year – 22-28 (13-23)
Here’s my problem. This is a safe space, right? Oh, it’s an article on a Missouri sports blog that can be read by anyone and has my name on it?
Ok, cool, yeah, pretty safe then.
The problem is this:
….
I like Lance Leipold a lot.
NOT because of what he’s done at kansas. As a college football hipster, I liked him waaaaaaaaaay before any of you knew who he was, when he was racking up multiple national championships at Wisconsin-Whitewater and turning freakin’ Buffalo into a competent football team.
Coach Leipold’s Resume
Truly, this open confession of mine can (dangerously) go even further: take off the ugly uniforms and ignore their address…
………
I really like this kansas football team for what it represents in college football. Specifically: a woebegone, truly awful team that brings in an enlightened coach, runs a super funky offense, and finds some scratch-and-dent recruits to fit into a system that works for reasons that are hard to describe.
It’s the same reason why I liked those Bill Snyder K-State teams in the late 90s, or any of Willie Fritz’s teams, or those Art Briles Baylor teams before we realized all the awful shit he was doing off the field.
At its core, to me, college football is at its best when traditionally decrepit teams finally make a hire that can turn it around via scheme, culture, and duct tape and paper clips, and the fact that it’s stupid kansas that is our most recent entry into the lore is incredible and infuriating.
But this is what Leipold does, and it’s been working since he first became a head coach in 2007. He’s really good at rehabbing broken programs, and I can’t wait until he leaves Lawrence for good.
Assistant Staff
As was to be expected, Jeff Grimes is no longer at kansas but not in the way you think. Instead of being fired, he unexpectedly left to take the Wisconsin offensive coordinator position. Grimes is still a well-respected offensive mind, even given his one year in Lawrence, but Leipold certainly didn’t expect him to leave so soon. What was also unexpected, though to a lesser extent, was the retirement of longtime Leipold defensive coordinator Brian Borland.
Therefore, Leipold promoted Jim Zebrowski who, last year, was the co-offensive coordinator as well as the quarterbacks coach. Zebrowski now gets the full OC title while holding on to his QB coaching responsibilities while Leipold backfilled the open offensive coach slot with Nevada’s former OC, Matt Lubick, as a co-coordinator and tight ends coach.
On the defensive side, Leipold promoted the Co-DC in D.K. McDonald to the prime chair while bumping GA Brandon Shelby to the vacant defensive backs slot. All of these guys ( including Lubick) have previous experience with either kansas or Leipold so they’re not huge reaches, but it is a level of newness in terms of roles and staff cohesion.
Roster Movement
The vast majority of kansas’ lost production came via graduation, but they still lost some pieces in the portal. None of these guys saw the field in any significant capacity but were most likely the first ones up to replace the starters. In any case, they’re gone now. Bye.
Due to the loss of graduating seniors, kansas went about as hard as you could go into the portal in an effort to restock…well, everything. Receiver, lineman on both sides, linebackers, defensive backs…call-ups, youngsters languishing on the bench, and older guys looking for one last go around litter the list of transfers into Lawrence in an effort to flash fill the depletions with pure numbers. 26 transfers in is a lot.
And then you get to the high school recruiting class which, at this point, feels almost like an afterthought. It was a very sleepy class of 15 3-star recruits, ranking 72nd in the nation and 15th in the XII. Not great overall but to be expected when your talent acquisition budget gets bogged down in 26 transfers.
Offense
At its core, the Leipold-Kotelnicki offense is one that utilizes a lot of odd formations, plenty of pre-snap motion, and the deployment of skill position players that aren’t elite at any one thing but are pretty good at a lot of different things. This lets the offense not have to rely on scheming open their best player but, instead, scheme up scenarios that can counter whatever the defense has shown that they want to do. Anyone can look great because anyone can get the ball and you never quite know where it’s going given the amount of information the offense is going to present on any given play. At its root, though, is a screwball mixture of veer and triple-option concepts that rely on a quarterback that can think quick and run effectively paired with skill position players that are multi-faceted. When it works, it works. And even with regression from the highs of ‘23, kansas’ offense was a top 35 unit overall, ranking 14th in rushing, 18th in passing, 8th in standard downs success rate, 20th in passing downs success rate, 17th in points per scoring opportunity, and 2nd in 3rd-down conversions.
So what was the issue? Why did they rank 35th instead of, ya know, Top 10 or whatever?
The answer is inaccurate passing (105th), mediocre explosiveness (56th), and a 25% 3-and-out rate paired with a bottom 100 4th-down conversion rate.
They weren’t terrible but that had just enough warts to keep them from being elite.
Quarterback
Photo by Richard Rodriguez/Getty Images
For all the hype that Daniels has (mostly reasonably) received, he has only played in 37 games over his 5-year career, receiving a season-ending injury in every season but the last one. When healthy he is a dynamic athlete that can add much needed mobility to the Jayhawk offense but his passing accuracy and propensity to throw multiple back-breaking interceptions has been his main weakness. If his third offensive coordinator in three years can help him read defenses better – or scheme him to avoid the obvious mistake – then he can be the most annoying player to go against. But if he presses in the passing game – which he has a tendency to do – then he can be the most annoying player to have on your team. Let’s hope for the latter.
Running Backs
Photo by Bruce Yeung/Getty Images
Well… Jalon Daniels is back! That’s good! But Devin Neal, kansas’ best rusher in quite some time, is now a New Orleans Saint and he alone represented 51.5% of the total carries of the ‘24 season. So now kansas looks to seldom-used backup Daniel Hishaw as the seasoned running back vet, while adding Leshon Williams from Iowa and potentially mixing in Harry Stewart and Johnny Thompson. The Leipold offense tends to help running backs shine no matter who is back there, and Daniels will provide a lot of cover with his running threat if healthy. But losing an all-time great and replacing him with a series of question marks isn’t the most assuring of situations.
Receivers
Photo by Matthew Maxey/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
There’s two ways you can look at the absence of returning kansas receivers:
- They return 9 targets from last year’s season and experience in the passing game is the best way to predict future success in the offense.
- kansas wasn’t good at passing, didn’t do it much, and they almost only threw at slot receivers (40.6% target rate) so it’s not like they need a good passing game
Regardless of the camp you fall into, it’s a lot of fun to point out that kansas, technically a P4 football team, has a running back as their returning leading receiver who had 3 targets on the year and 33 yards. Now, they rectified this by portalling in five pass catchers from other schools, including the prolific Bryson Canty from Columbia. But none of them are going to have multi-year rapport with Daniels and I don’t think many of them have the experience in this specific type of offense. It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes for them to click.
Offensive Line
Photo by Scott Winters/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
An offensive line that ranked 16th in pressures allowed and 10th in blocking accuracy loses three starters – including both tackles – and imports five transfers with 11 games of starting experience amongst them. While the portal era has taught us snaps and talent tend to trump starts and unit cohesion, it is still not a positive to have one of the better offensive units get, essentially, a full reset.
Defense
Brian Borland was a very underrated defensive coordinator, probably because he spent most of his career with a very underrated head coach who took jobs in the dark corners of college football. But there’s no doubt that he has some of least effective work at kansas, while acknowledging that he did a tremendous job pulling them out of the defensive crater that he found them in.
Last year’s kansas defense: not great. 103rd in success rate allowed, 130th in 3-and-out percentage, 123rd in penalties per game, 104th against the run, 93rd against the pass, 109th in standard downs, 107th in passing downs, 109th in 3rd-downs…they were ok in red zone touchdown rate and had a Top 30 interception rate but, otherwise, were not effective.
And from that ineffective unit they lose their top six tacklers, five of which were in the back seven. Their portal acquisitions, however, were definitely quality: two starting linebackers, two starting corners, plus some high-upside rotational pieces on the pass rushing front, including several SEC transplants. I think the talent upgrade on this side of the ball is more prevalent than the offensive side, and with a new coordinator everyone is getting a fresh reset and an ability to operate with the same new approach as everyone else. It could work, it could be disastrous, but at least it’s something different!
So what does it all mean?
Other than a surprise Week 0 tilt against Fresno State at home, kansas has its new-usual slate of middling college programs on the schedule in 2025. Missouri will be their toughest projected opponent of the year and it occurs in the second week of the season. They’ll have the benefit of an extra week of live fire but also have a lot more to replace on the team than Mizzou does.
I can’t wait for this game. I can’t wait to see those ugly fake birds on the helmets run out on to the field and get met with the most vicious booing and hostility that they’ve faced in their lifetimes. I can’t wait for the first big hit, first 3rd-down stop, or first Mizzou touchdown score and hear the mass of Missouri faithful roar and sway in the cathartic justice of watching kansas get its ass kicked by Mizzou. (editor’s note: this creates a beautiful mental picture)
I mostly don’t care about individual wins and losses anymore but I care a lot about this one. Eli Drinkwitz loves trophies and rivalry games and winning in those circumstances so I don’t doubt his motivation, but this is one you can’t lose.
Missouri football in 2025, should not lose to kansas football. I stand by this assertion.
F- – – – k u.