As unbelievable as this sounds, it’s true.
theathletic.com
TL-DR: KU hired Turner Gill instead of Jim Harbaugh…..and they still suck to this day.
Jim Harbaugh just wanted to get comfortable, so despite the stuffy setting — a job interview in a hotel suite in New York City — he asked if he could get a little informal.
“Guys, do you mind if I loosen up my tie or take my tie off?” Harbaugh said, according to a person in the room. “I’m not really a shirt-and-tie kind of guy. Can I take my jacket off?”
This was December 2009. Harbaugh, then in his third season at Stanford, was meeting with members of Kansas’ athletic department, including athletic director Lew Perkins. Days earlier, Kansas coach Mark Mangino had resigned after accusations about his mistreatment of players.
Harbaugh walked over to the bar and asked if anyone wanted a drink. Then he emptied a can of Coke, put in a rather sizable dip of chewing tobacco and used the can as a spittoon.
“I just want to be Jim Harbaugh for you all to see who I am,” he told the room.
Harbaugh had proven himself capable at tough jobs, having twice won 11 games at the University of San Diego and leading Stanford to the school’s first bowl in eight seasons. But as strange as it may sound now, the Kansas job then held a certain appeal. The Jayhawks had won 12 games and an Orange Bowl following the 2007 season, invested in new practice fields and a new football facility and were ranked in the top 20 as recently as October 2009. Harbaugh’s interest was also personal: His wife, Sarah, is from Kansas City, 40 minutes from Kansas’ campus.
But in the interview, Harbaugh was honest. If the NFL called, he would be tempted. And if Michigan called, he was gone. Still, just two years removed from the Orange Bowl season, Kansas had the chance to land Jim Harbaugh.
“Harbaugh would have taken it,” said Clint Bowen, a former Kansas assistant coach. “I was talking to him at the time. He would have taken the job.”
Instead, Perkins hired Turner Gill.
From that fork-in-the-road moment, Kansas devolved into the worst Power 5 program of the 2010s.
The Jayhawks finished last in the Big 12 nine out of 10 seasons. They lost to North Dakota State and South Dakota State, Nicholls State, Ohio (twice), Rice (twice) and Coastal Carolina (three times). The Jayhawks spent $8.96 million per winduring the decade, which included only one road victory. They did not win a single conference road contest in 56 games, the longest streak in college football history.
In 2011, they surrendered 70 points to Oklahoma State and managed 46 yards of offense against Texas. In 2012, their starting quarterback threw for 39 yards in one game and 29 yards in another, which wasn’t even the lowest single-game passing total of the decade (that would be 16 yards).
Attendance fell by 33 percent as Kansas ran through coaches at an alarming clip: two years of Gill (5-19), two-and-a-half of Charlie Weis (5-22), four of David Beaty (6-42) and two of Les Miles (3-18), spending a total of $20 million on buyouts. No one and nothing seemed to work.
One former Kansas assistant labeled it the “decade of disaster.”
Another former coach, when asked how the job was perceived in the coaching community during the 2010s, said bluntly: “As a death sentence.”
In the 2000s, Mangino built Kansas into a perennial bowl contender. But even as he won, some coaches and members of the athletic department sensed Perkins was eager to make a change. Perkins didn’t hire Mangino; he arrived three years after the coach. Both had bulldog personalities, and one assistant said coaches would hear the two screaming at each other in the football office.
In November 2005, the Kansas men’s basketball team played in the Maui Invitational. Dana Anderson, one of Kansas’ major boosters, was on the trip. At the same time the football team was 5-6 and about to play Iowa State. Perkins asked Anderson to take a walk on the beach. Anderson said Perkins wanted to discuss the football program ahead of the final game of the season.
“We’ll lose that game and, when we do, I’m going to fire Mangino,” Perkins said, according to Anderson.
Kansas beat Iowa State in overtime, then won the Fort Worth Bowl, the school’s first bowl win in a decade. But Anderson said he believed Perkins “had made up his mind from the beginning” about Mangino’s future.
The next year, Kansas went 6-6 but missed a bowl. Heading into the 2007 season, Perkins made it clear to several people that Mangino was under fire. He told one beat writer that he planned to move on from Mangino if the coach didn’t win seven or eight games. An assistant coach said Perkins told him: “You know that if you guys don’t win eight games this year I’m going to fire all of you.”
“He told me that right to my face,” the assistant said.
Another assistant said Perkins stood in front of a team meeting before the season and said: “This staff and this group of players is at least an eight-win team.”
The message: win big, or else.
Five months later, on a warm Miami night, the Jayhawks knocked off Virginia Tech in the Orange Bowl, the program’s singular achievement of the last 50 years. Kansas finished 12-1 and No.7 in the final AP poll, one spot ahead of Oklahoma.
After eight wins and another bowl victory in 2008, the 2009 season was the most hyped in years. The Kansas City Star picked Kansas to win nine games and the Big 12 North division, something the Jayhawks had never done before. Posters for that season read: History Awaits.
The Jayhawks started 5-0, climbing to 16th in the AP poll.
Then it all fell apart.
Some thought Perkins was conducting a ‘witch hunt’ as he efforted firing Mangino. (Jamie Squire / Getty Images)
Ahead of the sixth game of the season at Colorado, Mangino poked linebacker Arist Wright in the chest. No one disputes that the incident happened, although there is disagreement on whether the poke was over the line. The athletic department launched an investigation, interviewing players and coaches about Mangino’s conduct. The Jayhawks lost five in a row, and on Nov. 17, with two games left in the season, Perkins released a statementacknowledging the investigation. “I can confirm an internal review is underway,” Perkins said at the time.
As soon as that happened, six coaches and staffers had the same general reaction: “I thought: ‘Witch hunt. Here we go,’” an assistant coach said.
“The witch hunt was on for anything to start the process,” Bowen said.
“I think Lew was looking for something,” a longtime football staffer said.
Perkins, the coaches and staffers believe, had found his catalyst for change. Mangino was prone to motivate through fear and personal attacks. Some former players believed Mangino regularly crossed the line. Others appreciated what he built, thriving in the program’s hard-nosed culture.
As Mangino’s behavior cycled through the media, some senior athletic department officials were frustrated that Perkins essentially acted on his own throughout the process. But when the 2009 season was over and the investigation was complete, Mangino was out.
When Turner Gill became the next Kansas football coach, he unveiled an acronym that would serve as the foundation of his program: B.E.L.I.E.V.E. The first B stood, in part, for … “Believe.”
If ever there was a polar opposite of Mangino, it was Gill: gentlemanly, chiseled, godly in public, a former college star at Nebraska who had led Buffalo to a MAC championship in 2008. On the day Gill was introduced, Perkins drove to work and listened to “This Magic Moment.”
“I wanted somebody who was extremely positive,” Perkins told reporters.
In addition to Gill and Harbaugh, an athletic department source said Perkins interviewed former Tennessee coach Phil Fulmer, Minnesota coach Tim Brewster and Houston coach Kevin Sumlin. Kansas also reached out to Florida defensive coordinator Charlie Strong, who took the Louisville job that offseason. According to sources, Perkins declined to offer Harbaugh the job for two reasons: Harbaugh wanted to coach Stanford’s bowl game, and Perkins didn’t want to wait. And Perkins wanted a coach who was committed to Kansas for years.
“That was as important as anything to me,” Perkins said of Gill. “He wanted to be here for a long period of time.”
Not only was Gill out to prove that coaches could win without beating down their players, he was trying to match the stipulations Perkins had put in place. “They told him not to run off anybody,” an assistant said. “First year, just keep everybody intact. After that, you’ll be able to run the program you want.”
Discipline became a problem. Players skipped tutoring sessions. The team GPA plummeted. The strength program suffered. “It was rough,” an assistant coach said. Gill lost his first game to North Dakota State, 6-3, and three days later, Perkins abruptly retired amid a series of scandals in the athletic department, including questions about excessive spending.
The Jayhawks finished 3-9 in Gill’s first year. They fell to 2-10 the next year, and Perkins’ replacement, Sheahon Zenger, fired Gill after two seasons. At the press conference to announce Gill’s replacement, Zenger delivered what turned into a mocked set-up, punchline delivery.
“I set out to find the best,” Zenger said, “and I found Charlie Weis.”
Weis, a former Patriots assistant, was three years removed from his tenure at Notre Dame. He wasn’t a complete stranger in Kansas — in 2010, he’d served as offensive coordinator of the Kansas City Chiefs. But when Zenger offered him a five-year, $12.5 million contract, he was an assistant at the University of Florida. That wasn’t by accident.
The dismissals of Mangino, Perkins and Gill had cost the Kansas athletic department millions in buyouts, and the school’s chancellor, Bernadette Gray-Little, had tamped spending on athletics, mandating that Kansas could not hire anyone with an expensive buyout.
In one of Weis’ first moves, he parted ways with nearly 30 scholarship players. He put an emphasis on academics, instilled discipline and engaged with players. “It was as impressive as I’ve ever seen,” Bowen said. Weis hit the recruiting trail hard, pulling in two transfer quarterbacks, Dayne Crist from Notre Dame and Jake Heaps from BYU, who Weis viewed as potential saviors. When he introduced the pair to reporters, he couldn’t help himself.
“I wanted to address quarterback,” he said. “How’d I do?”
In truth, nothing was easy. The exodus gutted the roster. Assistant coaches were stunned by the lack of discipline in the program they inherited. In one instance, according to two former coaches, a starting defensive back told defensive coordinator Dave Campo to “**** off” on the sideline.
“The players were out of control,” a coach said.
The Jayhawks finished 1-11, their only win coming in the opener against South Dakota State. It was a demoralizing season, but coaches and staffers believed they were progressing.
Zenger, a former football coach, had begun his career on the staff at Kansas State, where he witnessed Bill Snyder turn a moribund program into a winner. Another member of that staff was George Matsakis, who was the director of football operations under Weis. After the 2012 season, Matsakis approached Zenger with a message: The program felt like Snyder in the early days.
“I’m telling you,” he told Zenger. “This thing is going like that.”
But something, multiple coaches said, seemed to change in Year 2. Weis could be abrasive, leaning into his East Coast persona and offering few olive branches to alumni. At Big 12 media days he called his team a “pile of crap.” One year, during a preseason pep rally, he joked that he would get into a “fistfight” with fans who didn’t go to games. Another year, he told fans they needed to be more positive. “Shut the hell up,” he said.
Behind the scenes, according to sources, Weis was frustrated. “These people don’t appreciate me,” he told one assistant coach.
“He came here with the right purpose and for a year he tried to do it,” Bowen said. “And then he started feeling underappreciated and I saw him change gears.”
In his final two seasons, Weis loaded up on junior college players, which turned a thin roster into an uneven one. According to assistant coaches, he was so consumed with public perception that he often read Kansas football message boards.
“Charlie would make a statement and after the meeting someone would say: ‘That was right on the message board,’” one former assistant coach said. “Or, ‘We’re doing this now because this is what No. 1 Jayhawks Fan said.’ That mentality definitely permeated the office.”
Another time, a rumor appeared on social media that Weis fell asleep during a position meeting (multiple sources confirmed the rumor as true). Weis, according to a story told by an assistant coach and confirmed by linebacker Ben Heeney, responded by standing before his team.
“Apparently something happened to where the media is saying I fell asleep,” Weis said, according to Heeney. “It would be great if some of you guys could just say your piece and have my back.”
Nobody did.
“I knew we were in trouble,” the assistant coach said. “I knew it was going to be hard turning it around.”
One day in the spring of 2014, Weis had a visitor. Jim Harbaugh was in town to see family and attend a basketball game at Allen Fieldhouse. When Harbaugh arrived, Weis was sitting in his office, a large beach towel draped over his legs — a symbolic image for at least one of Weis’ assistant coaches. “That was the state of the program,” the coach said. “That was where the program was at.”
Harbaugh stuck around to chat about the coaching world. He also attended a basketball practice, where he delivered a short pep talk, then drained a halfcourt shot in his trademark khakis.
Weis was fired four games into this third season.
While head coach of the Jayhawks, Weis fell asleep in team meetings and perused online fan message boards, according to sources. (Jamie Squire / Getty Images)
The search for Weis’ replacement was hamstrung by history.
“We were restricted by a chancellor who said there would be no buyouts because we had already spent money like that before,” said Anderson, the booster. “They were limited in who they could interview.”
A former administrator added: “There’s a perspective of what you’re allowed to invest in football at KU versus other things.”
After reportedly interviewing only assistant coaches, Zenger settled on David Beaty, a first-time head coach with only two years of coordinator experience. Hampered by Weis’ roster issues, Beaty’s first team went winless, then 2-10 and 1-11 before the school fired him after his fourth season, a 3-9 effort.
It was clear, from early on, that Beaty was simply underqualified and overmatched.
Kansas had spent the last decade firing coaches, then instituting financial restrictions on the next hire. When Jeff Long was hired in 2018, he tried to change the cycle, going big with former LSU coach Les Miles, whom he knew from a previous stint together at Michigan. The marriage was flashy — but troubled — from the start.
Before he officially hired Miles, Long reportedly had a Kansas video crew start filming him, in preparation for a series — “Miles to Go” — that would appear on ESPN+. Long also tried to avoid paying Beaty his buyout, reporting that his staff had committed a minor NCAA violation. The move led to a lawsuit that aired all sorts of embarrassing laundry, such as:
Kansas reached a settlement with Beaty, paying the former coach $2.55 million, plus legal fees. An independent agency hired by the NCAA withdrew the allegation of infractions against Beaty.
Kansas replaced Long with Travis Goff, an alum who had worked in the athletic department during the early Mangino years. In his search for a new coach, Goff conference called former players to talk about what a successful coach at Kansas looked like. Clint Bowen was on the call and listened as players mentioned the need for a coach who could recruit.
“I said, ‘I’m sorry guys, we’re not going to out-recruit anybody,’” Bowen said. “‘Let’s just look at the people on this phone call. Darrell Stuckey, it was us and Emporia State for you. Aqib Talib, it was us and a Mountain West Utah for you. Chris Harris, you were headed to Tulsa. Marcus Henry, you were headed to a junior college.’ I was like, ‘We out-evaluated people. We didn’t out-recruit for any of you guys. We out-evaluated.’”
Lance Leipold had that resume. He won six Division III championships at Wisconsin-Whitewater, then turned Buffalo from a 2-10 team in his second season to a 10-win team in year four. He was stable, seasoned and knew how to rebuild. Before he took the job, he called up a coach who understood what it took to win at Kansas: Mark Mangino.
“I like Lance,” Mangino said. “I think he’s done a great job everywhere he’s been.”
Leipold’s first season produced only two wins, but there were moments of progress. The Jayhawks pushed No. 3 Oklahoma into the fourth quarter. They stunned Texas in overtime, snapping their 56-game road conference losing streak, and closed the year with a three-point loss at TCU and a six-point loss to West Virginia.
When Banks Floodman, a former Kansas linebacker who worked in the athletic department, watched last year’s games, he wasn’t concerned with the scoreboard. Instead, he studied the team’s organization on the sideline, or if the defender farthest from the ball hustled.
“The things that you don’t see on the stat sheet but you see the shift in culture,” Floodman said. “Those are the things I’m starting to see.”
An assistant at another school said a few years ago, high school coaches in the state would tell him they hadn’t spoken or seen Kansas coaches in years; now he bumps into staffers on the recruiting trail all the time. “They honestly are as healthy as it’s ever been,” a Big 12 recruiting coordinator said. “I would think if they give Leipold five or six years, they’ll look up and be thankful that they did.”
For the first time in years, there is real optimism about Kansas football.
Kansas could've landed Jim Harbaugh. Instead, it began its 'decade of disaster'
Mark Mangino built the Jayhawks into a perennial bowl contender. Then they devolved into the worst Power 5 program of the 2010s.
theathletic.com
TL-DR: KU hired Turner Gill instead of Jim Harbaugh…..and they still suck to this day.
Jim Harbaugh just wanted to get comfortable, so despite the stuffy setting — a job interview in a hotel suite in New York City — he asked if he could get a little informal.
“Guys, do you mind if I loosen up my tie or take my tie off?” Harbaugh said, according to a person in the room. “I’m not really a shirt-and-tie kind of guy. Can I take my jacket off?”
This was December 2009. Harbaugh, then in his third season at Stanford, was meeting with members of Kansas’ athletic department, including athletic director Lew Perkins. Days earlier, Kansas coach Mark Mangino had resigned after accusations about his mistreatment of players.
Harbaugh walked over to the bar and asked if anyone wanted a drink. Then he emptied a can of Coke, put in a rather sizable dip of chewing tobacco and used the can as a spittoon.
“I just want to be Jim Harbaugh for you all to see who I am,” he told the room.
Harbaugh had proven himself capable at tough jobs, having twice won 11 games at the University of San Diego and leading Stanford to the school’s first bowl in eight seasons. But as strange as it may sound now, the Kansas job then held a certain appeal. The Jayhawks had won 12 games and an Orange Bowl following the 2007 season, invested in new practice fields and a new football facility and were ranked in the top 20 as recently as October 2009. Harbaugh’s interest was also personal: His wife, Sarah, is from Kansas City, 40 minutes from Kansas’ campus.
But in the interview, Harbaugh was honest. If the NFL called, he would be tempted. And if Michigan called, he was gone. Still, just two years removed from the Orange Bowl season, Kansas had the chance to land Jim Harbaugh.
“Harbaugh would have taken it,” said Clint Bowen, a former Kansas assistant coach. “I was talking to him at the time. He would have taken the job.”
Instead, Perkins hired Turner Gill.
From that fork-in-the-road moment, Kansas devolved into the worst Power 5 program of the 2010s.
The Jayhawks finished last in the Big 12 nine out of 10 seasons. They lost to North Dakota State and South Dakota State, Nicholls State, Ohio (twice), Rice (twice) and Coastal Carolina (three times). The Jayhawks spent $8.96 million per winduring the decade, which included only one road victory. They did not win a single conference road contest in 56 games, the longest streak in college football history.
In 2011, they surrendered 70 points to Oklahoma State and managed 46 yards of offense against Texas. In 2012, their starting quarterback threw for 39 yards in one game and 29 yards in another, which wasn’t even the lowest single-game passing total of the decade (that would be 16 yards).
Attendance fell by 33 percent as Kansas ran through coaches at an alarming clip: two years of Gill (5-19), two-and-a-half of Charlie Weis (5-22), four of David Beaty (6-42) and two of Les Miles (3-18), spending a total of $20 million on buyouts. No one and nothing seemed to work.
One former Kansas assistant labeled it the “decade of disaster.”
Another former coach, when asked how the job was perceived in the coaching community during the 2010s, said bluntly: “As a death sentence.”
In the 2000s, Mangino built Kansas into a perennial bowl contender. But even as he won, some coaches and members of the athletic department sensed Perkins was eager to make a change. Perkins didn’t hire Mangino; he arrived three years after the coach. Both had bulldog personalities, and one assistant said coaches would hear the two screaming at each other in the football office.
In November 2005, the Kansas men’s basketball team played in the Maui Invitational. Dana Anderson, one of Kansas’ major boosters, was on the trip. At the same time the football team was 5-6 and about to play Iowa State. Perkins asked Anderson to take a walk on the beach. Anderson said Perkins wanted to discuss the football program ahead of the final game of the season.
“We’ll lose that game and, when we do, I’m going to fire Mangino,” Perkins said, according to Anderson.
Kansas beat Iowa State in overtime, then won the Fort Worth Bowl, the school’s first bowl win in a decade. But Anderson said he believed Perkins “had made up his mind from the beginning” about Mangino’s future.
The next year, Kansas went 6-6 but missed a bowl. Heading into the 2007 season, Perkins made it clear to several people that Mangino was under fire. He told one beat writer that he planned to move on from Mangino if the coach didn’t win seven or eight games. An assistant coach said Perkins told him: “You know that if you guys don’t win eight games this year I’m going to fire all of you.”
“He told me that right to my face,” the assistant said.
Another assistant said Perkins stood in front of a team meeting before the season and said: “This staff and this group of players is at least an eight-win team.”
The message: win big, or else.
Five months later, on a warm Miami night, the Jayhawks knocked off Virginia Tech in the Orange Bowl, the program’s singular achievement of the last 50 years. Kansas finished 12-1 and No.7 in the final AP poll, one spot ahead of Oklahoma.
After eight wins and another bowl victory in 2008, the 2009 season was the most hyped in years. The Kansas City Star picked Kansas to win nine games and the Big 12 North division, something the Jayhawks had never done before. Posters for that season read: History Awaits.
The Jayhawks started 5-0, climbing to 16th in the AP poll.
Then it all fell apart.
Some thought Perkins was conducting a ‘witch hunt’ as he efforted firing Mangino. (Jamie Squire / Getty Images)
Ahead of the sixth game of the season at Colorado, Mangino poked linebacker Arist Wright in the chest. No one disputes that the incident happened, although there is disagreement on whether the poke was over the line. The athletic department launched an investigation, interviewing players and coaches about Mangino’s conduct. The Jayhawks lost five in a row, and on Nov. 17, with two games left in the season, Perkins released a statementacknowledging the investigation. “I can confirm an internal review is underway,” Perkins said at the time.
As soon as that happened, six coaches and staffers had the same general reaction: “I thought: ‘Witch hunt. Here we go,’” an assistant coach said.
“The witch hunt was on for anything to start the process,” Bowen said.
“I think Lew was looking for something,” a longtime football staffer said.
Perkins, the coaches and staffers believe, had found his catalyst for change. Mangino was prone to motivate through fear and personal attacks. Some former players believed Mangino regularly crossed the line. Others appreciated what he built, thriving in the program’s hard-nosed culture.
As Mangino’s behavior cycled through the media, some senior athletic department officials were frustrated that Perkins essentially acted on his own throughout the process. But when the 2009 season was over and the investigation was complete, Mangino was out.
When Turner Gill became the next Kansas football coach, he unveiled an acronym that would serve as the foundation of his program: B.E.L.I.E.V.E. The first B stood, in part, for … “Believe.”
If ever there was a polar opposite of Mangino, it was Gill: gentlemanly, chiseled, godly in public, a former college star at Nebraska who had led Buffalo to a MAC championship in 2008. On the day Gill was introduced, Perkins drove to work and listened to “This Magic Moment.”
“I wanted somebody who was extremely positive,” Perkins told reporters.
In addition to Gill and Harbaugh, an athletic department source said Perkins interviewed former Tennessee coach Phil Fulmer, Minnesota coach Tim Brewster and Houston coach Kevin Sumlin. Kansas also reached out to Florida defensive coordinator Charlie Strong, who took the Louisville job that offseason. According to sources, Perkins declined to offer Harbaugh the job for two reasons: Harbaugh wanted to coach Stanford’s bowl game, and Perkins didn’t want to wait. And Perkins wanted a coach who was committed to Kansas for years.
“That was as important as anything to me,” Perkins said of Gill. “He wanted to be here for a long period of time.”
Not only was Gill out to prove that coaches could win without beating down their players, he was trying to match the stipulations Perkins had put in place. “They told him not to run off anybody,” an assistant said. “First year, just keep everybody intact. After that, you’ll be able to run the program you want.”
Discipline became a problem. Players skipped tutoring sessions. The team GPA plummeted. The strength program suffered. “It was rough,” an assistant coach said. Gill lost his first game to North Dakota State, 6-3, and three days later, Perkins abruptly retired amid a series of scandals in the athletic department, including questions about excessive spending.
The Jayhawks finished 3-9 in Gill’s first year. They fell to 2-10 the next year, and Perkins’ replacement, Sheahon Zenger, fired Gill after two seasons. At the press conference to announce Gill’s replacement, Zenger delivered what turned into a mocked set-up, punchline delivery.
“I set out to find the best,” Zenger said, “and I found Charlie Weis.”
Weis, a former Patriots assistant, was three years removed from his tenure at Notre Dame. He wasn’t a complete stranger in Kansas — in 2010, he’d served as offensive coordinator of the Kansas City Chiefs. But when Zenger offered him a five-year, $12.5 million contract, he was an assistant at the University of Florida. That wasn’t by accident.
The dismissals of Mangino, Perkins and Gill had cost the Kansas athletic department millions in buyouts, and the school’s chancellor, Bernadette Gray-Little, had tamped spending on athletics, mandating that Kansas could not hire anyone with an expensive buyout.
In one of Weis’ first moves, he parted ways with nearly 30 scholarship players. He put an emphasis on academics, instilled discipline and engaged with players. “It was as impressive as I’ve ever seen,” Bowen said. Weis hit the recruiting trail hard, pulling in two transfer quarterbacks, Dayne Crist from Notre Dame and Jake Heaps from BYU, who Weis viewed as potential saviors. When he introduced the pair to reporters, he couldn’t help himself.
“I wanted to address quarterback,” he said. “How’d I do?”
In truth, nothing was easy. The exodus gutted the roster. Assistant coaches were stunned by the lack of discipline in the program they inherited. In one instance, according to two former coaches, a starting defensive back told defensive coordinator Dave Campo to “**** off” on the sideline.
“The players were out of control,” a coach said.
The Jayhawks finished 1-11, their only win coming in the opener against South Dakota State. It was a demoralizing season, but coaches and staffers believed they were progressing.
Zenger, a former football coach, had begun his career on the staff at Kansas State, where he witnessed Bill Snyder turn a moribund program into a winner. Another member of that staff was George Matsakis, who was the director of football operations under Weis. After the 2012 season, Matsakis approached Zenger with a message: The program felt like Snyder in the early days.
“I’m telling you,” he told Zenger. “This thing is going like that.”
But something, multiple coaches said, seemed to change in Year 2. Weis could be abrasive, leaning into his East Coast persona and offering few olive branches to alumni. At Big 12 media days he called his team a “pile of crap.” One year, during a preseason pep rally, he joked that he would get into a “fistfight” with fans who didn’t go to games. Another year, he told fans they needed to be more positive. “Shut the hell up,” he said.
Behind the scenes, according to sources, Weis was frustrated. “These people don’t appreciate me,” he told one assistant coach.
“He came here with the right purpose and for a year he tried to do it,” Bowen said. “And then he started feeling underappreciated and I saw him change gears.”
In his final two seasons, Weis loaded up on junior college players, which turned a thin roster into an uneven one. According to assistant coaches, he was so consumed with public perception that he often read Kansas football message boards.
“Charlie would make a statement and after the meeting someone would say: ‘That was right on the message board,’” one former assistant coach said. “Or, ‘We’re doing this now because this is what No. 1 Jayhawks Fan said.’ That mentality definitely permeated the office.”
Another time, a rumor appeared on social media that Weis fell asleep during a position meeting (multiple sources confirmed the rumor as true). Weis, according to a story told by an assistant coach and confirmed by linebacker Ben Heeney, responded by standing before his team.
“Apparently something happened to where the media is saying I fell asleep,” Weis said, according to Heeney. “It would be great if some of you guys could just say your piece and have my back.”
Nobody did.
“I knew we were in trouble,” the assistant coach said. “I knew it was going to be hard turning it around.”
One day in the spring of 2014, Weis had a visitor. Jim Harbaugh was in town to see family and attend a basketball game at Allen Fieldhouse. When Harbaugh arrived, Weis was sitting in his office, a large beach towel draped over his legs — a symbolic image for at least one of Weis’ assistant coaches. “That was the state of the program,” the coach said. “That was where the program was at.”
Harbaugh stuck around to chat about the coaching world. He also attended a basketball practice, where he delivered a short pep talk, then drained a halfcourt shot in his trademark khakis.
Weis was fired four games into this third season.
While head coach of the Jayhawks, Weis fell asleep in team meetings and perused online fan message boards, according to sources. (Jamie Squire / Getty Images)
The search for Weis’ replacement was hamstrung by history.
“We were restricted by a chancellor who said there would be no buyouts because we had already spent money like that before,” said Anderson, the booster. “They were limited in who they could interview.”
A former administrator added: “There’s a perspective of what you’re allowed to invest in football at KU versus other things.”
After reportedly interviewing only assistant coaches, Zenger settled on David Beaty, a first-time head coach with only two years of coordinator experience. Hampered by Weis’ roster issues, Beaty’s first team went winless, then 2-10 and 1-11 before the school fired him after his fourth season, a 3-9 effort.
It was clear, from early on, that Beaty was simply underqualified and overmatched.
Kansas had spent the last decade firing coaches, then instituting financial restrictions on the next hire. When Jeff Long was hired in 2018, he tried to change the cycle, going big with former LSU coach Les Miles, whom he knew from a previous stint together at Michigan. The marriage was flashy — but troubled — from the start.
Before he officially hired Miles, Long reportedly had a Kansas video crew start filming him, in preparation for a series — “Miles to Go” — that would appear on ESPN+. Long also tried to avoid paying Beaty his buyout, reporting that his staff had committed a minor NCAA violation. The move led to a lawsuit that aired all sorts of embarrassing laundry, such as:
- In a filing, Beaty alleged that Long was trying to find something — like a “dead hooker in (Beaty’s) closet” — to avoid paying him $3 million (a Kansas athletics spokesperson said the filing was “full of false claims and factual misstatement”).
- In a sworn deposition, Long struggled to recall the names of any other candidates he considered other than Miles. He referred to former Arizona State coach Todd Graham as “Todd Graham or Grantham.” He referred to Bengals assistant Lou Anarumo as “the defensive coordinator for the Cincinnati Bengals, and I’m going to forget his name as well.” He also tried to recall the name of Rams assistant Jedd Fisch but said he was “struggling with his name.”
- In another sworn deposition from a former Kansas athletics staffer, Long was alleged to have made a sexual remark about an elderly female donor. (Another Kansas spokesperson said the deposition was “full of outright fabrications.”)
Kansas reached a settlement with Beaty, paying the former coach $2.55 million, plus legal fees. An independent agency hired by the NCAA withdrew the allegation of infractions against Beaty.
Kansas replaced Long with Travis Goff, an alum who had worked in the athletic department during the early Mangino years. In his search for a new coach, Goff conference called former players to talk about what a successful coach at Kansas looked like. Clint Bowen was on the call and listened as players mentioned the need for a coach who could recruit.
“I said, ‘I’m sorry guys, we’re not going to out-recruit anybody,’” Bowen said. “‘Let’s just look at the people on this phone call. Darrell Stuckey, it was us and Emporia State for you. Aqib Talib, it was us and a Mountain West Utah for you. Chris Harris, you were headed to Tulsa. Marcus Henry, you were headed to a junior college.’ I was like, ‘We out-evaluated people. We didn’t out-recruit for any of you guys. We out-evaluated.’”
Lance Leipold had that resume. He won six Division III championships at Wisconsin-Whitewater, then turned Buffalo from a 2-10 team in his second season to a 10-win team in year four. He was stable, seasoned and knew how to rebuild. Before he took the job, he called up a coach who understood what it took to win at Kansas: Mark Mangino.
“I like Lance,” Mangino said. “I think he’s done a great job everywhere he’s been.”
Leipold’s first season produced only two wins, but there were moments of progress. The Jayhawks pushed No. 3 Oklahoma into the fourth quarter. They stunned Texas in overtime, snapping their 56-game road conference losing streak, and closed the year with a three-point loss at TCU and a six-point loss to West Virginia.
When Banks Floodman, a former Kansas linebacker who worked in the athletic department, watched last year’s games, he wasn’t concerned with the scoreboard. Instead, he studied the team’s organization on the sideline, or if the defender farthest from the ball hustled.
“The things that you don’t see on the stat sheet but you see the shift in culture,” Floodman said. “Those are the things I’m starting to see.”
An assistant at another school said a few years ago, high school coaches in the state would tell him they hadn’t spoken or seen Kansas coaches in years; now he bumps into staffers on the recruiting trail all the time. “They honestly are as healthy as it’s ever been,” a Big 12 recruiting coordinator said. “I would think if they give Leipold five or six years, they’ll look up and be thankful that they did.”
For the first time in years, there is real optimism about Kansas football.
