Lance Leipold knows the margins are small, but they have to improve
Lance Leipold has preached the same thing over and over in his coaching tenure at Kansas. Multiple times over the years he has talked about how slim the margins are between winning and losing.
Over the last two seasons the Jayhawks have been on the wrong side of the slim margins finishing 5-7 in 2024 and 2025. They are just one more win each season of a bowl game and they had their chances.
The last two years Kansas had the lead in the fourth in nine of their losses. That’s right. There were nine times they took a lead into the final 15 minutes only to come away with a loss.
“We have to get better on both sides of the ball,” Leipold said. “You know, as I’ve said within multiple meetings with different people — could be administratively, it could be within our building and our staff— we all can sit there and we could pick out three or four plays. And some of the things that everybody’s wanting certain things to happen, we would not even be talking about those. The margin of error is small. We’ve said that for five years in here, and it continues to be small.”
Leipold isn’t numb to the fact they had their chances. He knows the opportunities have been there for six win plus seasons that would make them bowl eligible and even more. They left a lot on the table over the last two years.
The fact is that the program should have been in four straight bowl games. Kansas has only been to back-to-back bowl games twice in the program’s history. One of those came under Leipold.
Bringing back Andy Kotelnicki could revive the offense having a new voice and ideas in the room. Kotelnicki will call the plays and have the assistance of Jim Zebrowski and Matt Lubick who he has worked with before.
Leipold believes year two will be better
And Leipold believes his staff, especially on defense, will fare better going year two of their scheme with the same coaches. He admitted he was moving forward with the same staff if they did not bring Kotelnicki back to Lawrence.
“At the same time, we have to progress,” he said. “I can’t stick my head in the sand on it and find ways for us to make our offense and our defense better. If Andy wasn’t available, we would have stayed status quo. And I’ve said this before; we had two first-year coordinators. I would think everybody in this room was better at their job the second year than they were the first year.”
Leipold and his staff have taken the program up a notch where 5-7 seasons are considered down years among the fan base. But he knows getting back to bowl games are at least the standard.
“We’re in a society right now where we want everything instantly and we want change right away when something doesn’t go right,” he said. “And I wasn’t about that. I’ve never been about that, and I won’t be about that.
“I understand what we’re up against. I know we have to get better. We’ll continue to evaluate what we’re doing. There are some things and there’s things that we didn’t get better at. We weren’t good in the red zone. We turned the ball over late in the game when we had chances to beat a ranked football team and close out the season. Very unfortunate, but we all know that’s what college football is right now. It’s very close, and we have to find ways to continue to get better.”
