The KU pocketknife incident is bizarre — and leaves a mysterious question
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- KU coach Lance Leipold wrongly stated a fan’s thrown knife struck staff, prompting fines.
- Video released by Texas Tech lacks clarity and fails to establish origin.
- The Big 12 Conference has not taken questions on the incident.
Lance Leipold sat behind a microphone in Lubbock, Texas, late Saturday, the Kansas football coach on the wrong end of a 42-17 drumming against Texas Tech. That’s probably the kind of thing he didn’t want to discuss for the next 10 minutes, so, alas, he found a distraction.
The wrong distraction.
There is plenty of mystery still outstanding in the diversion he introduced, the highly unusual plot of a pocketknife gone rogue in Lubbock.
But there’s little ambiguity in its mistake.
Leipold is now lodged in the middle of a never-ending story he wishes would vaporize, which is among the story’s many twists: He’s the one who voluntarily opened this book. He’s the reason we’re all reading.
After the game, it was Leipold who declared that a pocketknife “was thrown and hit one of our staff members,” news to the rest of us.
Turns out, that’s not accurate. There is no evidence of a pocketknife being among the many items Texas Tech fans hurled onto the field during the game Saturday night, and it’s since been made clear that the recovered knife did not hit a staff member at all.
Rather, a Kansas player discovered a pocketknife sitting on the sideline, grabbed it and handed it to a staff member, who immediately informed Leipold of it.
How do we — the media, and therefore the public — even know about this incident in the first place?
Leipold opened the door, inviting us all to find out more, and now he can’t slam it shut.
He got it wrong. He can’t get that kind of thing wrong, and it’s hard to imagine a worse setting to get it wrong than a news conference. This isn’t a coach trusting a player’s explanation of a pass interference call and walking into an interview and running with it.
It is a serious accusation — that a fan threw a knife toward the KU sideline, striking a member of the staff. The rush to make it public before making it certain is without excuse. It’s why KU is staring at a $25,000 fine and Leipold is left to issue a public apology, with an accompanying statement from athletic director Travis Goff reprimanding the choice of order of operations.
He has to be better. That’s the easy conclusion.
But we’re still left with the mystery of another — a question we cannot lose amid whatever Leipold should (or should not) have done.
How did the pocketknife wind up on the sideline of a college football game?
Its existence isn’t in dispute. KU and Texas Tech officials probably don’t agree on much in this narrative, but that’s an accepted truth: Texas Tech police has a pocketknife that was found on the field during the game.
How?
The Big 12 Conference fined Leipold for “an inaccurate statement” in his postgame comments on the incident, though the league left us to dig to find out what exactly it deemed inaccurate. The league also issued Texas Tech the same $25,000 fine for failing to deter fans from “the repeated throwing of objects onto the field and team bench areas.”
It will have no further comment, the conference said, four words after patting itself on the back for its integrity.
Sorry, but one quick follow-up question, if I may: What about the knife?
The Texas Tech athletics department seems eager to disseminate a video and narrative that it claimed in a letter to the league office “makes it clear where the pocketknife originated,” pointing the finger at a Kansas staffer for dropping the knife before a player scooped it up.
I’ve seen the video, obtained by The Star’s Shreyas Laddha, and we’ve posted it online for you to see, too. I’ve shared it with friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances and asked them what they see. You know what word is never used?
Clear.
I actually have more questions after watching the video than I did before seeing it.
Why is Texas Tech lining up behind a video that seems like it was filmed with a 2003 Razr flip phone and pointing to it as “clear” evidence of KU’s guilt? Why is the university pointing the finger at anyone at all? Why is it rushing to a convenient conclusion absent any real certainty in the evidence?
Isn’t that the same mistake we’re denouncing Leipold for making?
Texas Tech didn’t stop at disputing KU’s version of the events. Its athletics department offered an alternative theory. The letter to the league breeds an implication, albeit without stating it outright: that someone associated with KU is deliberately lying.
The Big 12 evidently isn’t buying that the video demonstrates much of anything, by the way. That’s my own deduction, because the league isn’t responding to our questions on the incident. But I have to believe if the league determined a KU staffer brought a knife to the game, carried it on the sideline, dropped it there and then subsequently lied about it all, we’d be hearing about more than a $25,000 fine. But it would be nice to hear, well, something on that accusation.
Heck, we can’t completely rule that out, because we can’t completely rule anything out based on the hyper zoomed-in video the school released. It sure would be nice, though, if the Big 12 Conference could tell us what their investigation has revealed — or even if they plan to investigate it further at all.
Leipold’s inaccurate narrative occupied a lot of air in the room Wednesday, but there should be just enough left to dig for that story.
KU officials spent the past couple of days interviewing staffers and reviewing their own film of the game, and they’re left where that investigation started: shrugging their shoulders as to how a pocketknife made its way onto their sideline.
Really, that’s one thing we should all agree on, aside from the fact that a staffer wasn’t struck. It’s the very manner in which Leipold should have replied had he been asked about it after the game, and the very thing Texas Tech should have sent the league.
We don’t know much else for certain.
This story was originally published October 16, 2025 at 6:00 AM.