Kansas football coach David Beaty draws inspiration and hope from Royals’ story

The Kansas football program and the World Series champion Royals are not linked by much, of course, other than a general proximity, an overlap in fan bases and a few local KU players who grew up rooting for the Royals.

But in the aftermath of the Royals’ world championship, Kansas coach David Beaty is hopeful the link can someday be more than that.

He sees the Royals as a general template of sorts, another inspiration for a football program in the painful early stages of a rebuilding project. On Monday, the day after the Royals’ series-clinching victory, Beaty sat in a team meeting inside the Anderson Family Football Complex and offered his team a Kansas City history lesson, retracing the Royals’ steps from a perennial sad sack to the best team in baseball.

“All the folks that had that vision,” Beaty said. “They stayed the course. What a great story they are.”

One story is baseball, of course, and the other is college football. But as the Jayhawks, 0-8, brace for a road trip to Texas, 3-5, on Saturday, Beaty is trying to siphon inspiration from wherever he can find it. It’s been that kind of fall in Lawrence, the kind of character-building stretch that can leave an offensive coordinator — in this case, Rob Likens — joking that he’s become “closer to God” this season.

On Tuesday, as Beaty contemplated the state of his program and thought of the Royals, he also referenced Virginia Tech coach Frank Beamer, who has announced his retirement following this season, and Kansas State coach Bill Snyder. Before turning Virginia Tech into a power, Beamer finished just 2-9 in his first season in 1987. The next year, he was just 3-8. Snyder’s Manhattan project, which began with a 1-10 record in 1989, followed a familiar pattern.

“If you go back and look at their careers and how it started and how their programs hung with them, just like the Royals hung with their guy,” Beaty said. “Those things to me are how you create winners over a long period of time.”

In the moment, this kind of rhetoric can feel like standard operating procedure. The Jayhawks are staring down the barrel of a winless season, and in the last four weeks, Kansas has been outscored 216-44 in losses to Baylor, Texas Tech, Oklahoma State and Oklahoma. Now the Jayhawks will face a Texas program going through its own rebuilding hardships. The Longhorns are just 3-5 and reeling after a 24-0 loss at Iowa State last week. In year two under head coach Charlie Strong, it appeared a breakthrough was near after consecutive victories over Oklahoma and K-State. But the loss at Iowa State has clouded that narrative.

Suffice to say, Beaty and Strong can relate to the difficulties of taking over Big 12 football programs.

“I say it all the time, you don’t get three years worth of work in six months and (have) it last,” Beaty said. “There’s some people that could create something for a short period of time, but most of the time, when you’re cutting corners like that, it’s hard for it to last for a long, long time.”

In this way, Beaty can take some solace in the Royals’ story. It took general manager Dayton Moore almost a decade to build a championship organization. It took time to instill a culture and acquire talent and piece it all together. For Beaty, it’s a reassuring thought. At the moment, there’s nothing to do but stay the course.

“It will cycle back around,” Beaty said. “… We’ll realize that the only way you do it is by being committed and sticking to it and staying the course if you want to create something over a long period of time.”

This story was originally published November 5, 2015 at 4:54 PM with the headline "Kansas football coach David Beaty draws inspiration and hope from Royals’ story."