New KU football coach Lance Leipold: One facet most important with Jayhawks’ rebuild
In the last few weeks, Lance Leipold had phone conversations with former KU Jayhawks coaches Glen Mason and Mark Mangino about the open football position.
Their thoughts?
“You can win. You can win,” Leipold said, minutes after he was formally introduced as the Jayhawks’ new football coach on Monday morning at KU football’s practice facility. “I think some of the ways that they’ve gone about it are blueprints.”
And the 56-year-old Leipold, in particular, seems concerned with bringing one aspect back to KU’s football offices.
A word he repeated often during his 40-minute introduction: continuity. It’s not only what helped Mason and Mangino build KU into a respectable program in previous decades, but also what Leipold has been about during previous lengthy stops at Wisconsin-Whitewater and Buffalo.
“I’m not a guy that’s moved around a lot,” Leipold said, “and this is a place I want to be for a very, very long time.”
So the goal now is to give KU’s players some cohesion. Leipold mentioned this when assembling his coaching staff as well, as he doesn’t want to look short-term while keeping assistants just to get KU through the 2021 season; he wants to think big picture and keep a group together to help development in future years.
It will be a build for sure. The Jayhawks, since Mangino’s departure in 2009, have gone 21-108 while cascading through four separate full-time coaches.
That history didn’t deter Leipold, though, after he took on a similar project at Buffalo before leading the Bulls to three consecutive bowl games.
“I think at a higher level, there were some parallels that they said about the last job I took. There’s a lot of people that told me not to take the Buffalo job,” Leipold said. “I felt there were parts there (where) we did a lot there. It was time for another one. It’s what I want to do.”
Leipold — he went 109-6 overall at his alma mater Wisconsin-Whitewater, leading the Warhawks to six Division III national championships in eight seasons before heading to Buffalo — also gave some insight into his thinking about the KU job in a side session with reporters afterward.
He was born in Jefferson, Wisconsin, a town of about 8,000 between Madison and Milwaukee. While growing up, he followed sports teams that were identified as small-market.
“The Milwaukee Brewers and the Kansas City Royals don’t have the same resources and everything as the Yankees. The Green Bay Packers and the Chiefs don’t have what the Cowboys have,” Leipold said. “That’s the way I was raised.”
The comparison to KU’s current position is evident. The Jayhawks will start out with fewer resources than Big 12 foes. They don’t have the devoted fan support or talent that many other programs do.
It won’t stop Leipold from dreaming big about what could be ahead while believing KU will accomplish that by keeping its head down collectively.
“The goal is to win championships, pure and simple, one day at a time,” Leipold said. “Become a consistent winner, attention to detail, do it with great energy, passion, and effort.
“It’s not overly complicated. It’s gonna take some work.”
Leipold hopes many of the current players keep an open mind when deciding whether to stay. In his first meeting with the team on Friday, he relayed that he’d told them, “Our plan is to win, and win with the players that are here right now.”
In addition, Leipold spoke about the importance of recruiting Kansas and the nearby region while building an identity off that.
“Some of the programs in the Midwest, when you see what they do — and they play a certain brand of football that is physical, tough, disciplined football — it’s usually a lot of (their) core people are right there in the backyard,” Leipold said. “And we plan to do that as well.”
Mason, for one, believes Leipold is the right guy for the job.
When KU’s position first came open, Mason said he first thought of Leipold after being impressed by his program-building and organization with Buffalo.
“I wouldn’t say it’s a home-run hire. I’d think it’s a grand-slam hire,” Mason said. “Because looking at what needs to be done there ... he’s got the maturity, he’s got the determination.”
