Lance Leipold and Kansas met with reporters on Thursday in one of the more entertaining press conferences I’ve watched in a minute. It was a chance to acknowledge some staff changes and clarify which roles fall to whom ahead of spring football and Leipold’s sixth season on the job in Lawrence.
The headlining staffing change is the rehiring of former Penn State offensive coordinator Andy Kotelnicki, who returns to Kansas following two seasons under James Franklin and interim coach Terry Smith. The Nittany Lions went 20-9 during Kotelnicki’s time with the offense and ultimately revived its disappointing start to 2025 with a 7-6 record and a 22-10 win against Clemson in the Pinstripe Bowl in December.
That same month saw Kotelnicki weighing his coaching options across college football, and what he described on Wednesday as a “flattering number” of interest didn’t outweigh his interest in coming back to his first Power 4 coaching gig, Kansas.
In January, Kansas announced Kotelnicki would become the “associate head coach” to Leipold, while question marks floated around what the previous offensive coordinators Jim Zebrowski and Matt Lubick‘s titles would become, or whether they’d be calling the plays whatsoever. In short, all three – Kotelnicki, Zebrowski and Lubick – will be guiding this ship together.
Leipold announced on Wednesday that Kotelnicki will become the offensive general, while Zebrowski’s title shifts to pass-game coordinator; Lubick will continue his work with the tight ends and retain his co-offensive coordinator role, focusing on the option run game. It’s a trifecta of multi-year Kansas staffers largely familiar to Leipold’s staff and/or the roster on hand (Kotelnicki left Kansas for Penn State at the end of the 2023 season).
This sort of “hive mind,” if I can even call it that, surely can’t hurt a Jayhawk offense that remained competitive last year despite failing to close out multiple conference games and, as a result, closed yet another season at 5-7 without a bowl trip. It’s more than a band-aid, and it’s the deepest offensive coaching staff I’ve seen compiled at Kansas – not to say it’ll work, but I’m hardly arguing.
It’s an interesting approach, now that Kansas is navigating a quarterback conversation around three candidates – Cole Ballard, Isaiah Marshall and Rice transfer Chase Jenkins – to lead a compelling mixture of returning starters and incoming transfers, including former Kansas State running back Dylan Edwards.
Any Kotelnicki deal meant Leipold would have to reconfigure his offensive staff, and this formation brings out what each coordinator does best:
- Kotelnicki led some of the best Kansas offenses in recent memory from 2021 to 2023, including one of the highest-scoring units in the school’s history (2022, 2023). His 2023 offense ranked eighth in the nation in both yards per play (7.0) and rushing (211.3).
- Zebrowski molded the likes of Jalon Daniels and Jason Bean, two of the school’s best starting quarterbacks produced in over a decade. While neither will likely see much of a career in the league, they helped put Kansas in the AP Top 25 nine times between 2022 and 2024. The Zebrowski-Lubick offense averaged 390.5 yards per game last year.
- Lubick‘s been around college football for a long time, including stops at Nebraska and Washington in his former lives. His record running the option was critical to those Kansas offenses from 2022 and 2023, when he served as a senior analyst. Lubick spent the 2024 season at Nevada, but came back to Lawrence to help Zebrowski as co-offensive coordinator and tight ends coach last year; Lubick helped senior tight end Boden Groen finish top-3 in receiving.
Listen, there are a ton of unknowns about what Kansas looks like in 2026. Between a completely new run game with three potential starters, and the return of D.K. McDonald following a far-from-perfect first campaign as defensive coordinator.
But you can sail choppy water with these three guys in the room. Maybe it doesn’t work out, and a resulting power struggle ultimately hurts this team in the end – I don’t know. What I do know is that all three could interview elsewhere (and certainly have) but remain seated at Kansas.
A lot of that comes from what Leipold has engineered in terms of facilities and a new stadium, two almost invaluable chips to bargain with when talking about the current era of college athletics and the continued importance of the College Football Playoff. This isn’t a CFP team, but the Jayhawks are no longer a conference pushover, competitively speaking, and have all the bells and whistles of a program one strong season away from taking that next step.
