speaking of former Rice Coaches; Nice piece on new Kansas head Coach David Beaty:
Beaty’s Burden: How Kansas’s New Coach Is Tackling One of College Football’s Toughest Rebuilding Jobs
College Football May 12, 2015 by Matt Hinton
Kansas, as the locals will tell you, is not as flat as you’ve been led to believe. It can feel that way over certain stretches, if you happen to be traveling west on I-70 or one of its rural siphons, across the longitudinal no-man’s-land where the leafy eastern half of the continent is gradually swallowed up by the steppe. For the most part, though, that portrait seems to have been painted by people whose notions of the state were informed mainly by Auntie Em.
If you ever find yourself traversing the University of Kansas campus, for example, you’ll be disabused of any lingering prairie stereotypes: The school sits on a slope formidable enough to carry the name Mount Oread, a.k.a. “The Hill,”1 the highest point in the city of Lawrence and, infamously, the staging ground for a Civil War massacre carried out against the town’s civilian population by Confederate troops. The university sprouted up in stages over the ensuing decades, including Memorial Stadium in 1921, on the northern side of the summit. As the locals will also tell you, this is the only conceivable sense in which Jayhawks football can be said to occupy the high ground.
From every other vantage point, the program has been more closely associated with the Big 12 basement — or, more recently, with a smoldering crater. Kansas has always been, and will always be, a basketball school: While the hoops team regards the Big 12 title as a birthright, the football team hasn’t claimed a conference championship since 1968, when it still played in the Big Eight. Even by the forgiving standards of the previous half-century, though, the last six years of KU football have been an exercise in historic gridiron futility. Since 2009, the Jayhawks have managed the fewest wins (17) of any FBS team in a major conference, and the fewest conference wins (4) of any FBS team, period. In five of those six years, they finished in last place or tied for last place.2 Three head coaches (Mark Mangino, Turner Gill, and Charlie Weis) were sent packing in that span, continuing the spiral.
Last year, official attendance for home games declined to a little more than 30,000 per game — which, adjusting for routine attendance inflation, means the 50,000-seat stadium was frequently left half-empty. Inevitably, the half that showed was left to ponder the eternal question: Is it basketball season yet?
“I mean, that’s always gonna be there just because we’re at Kansas,” says junior quarterback Montell Cozart, a part-time starter the past two years who spent spring practice locked in a battle for the full-time job. “It’s a basketball school, it’s tradition. But we’re here. And we feel like of course winning a couple games is going to help that. We’ve got to get over that hump where a couple turnovers happen and everyone goes, ‘Here we go again.’ We’re trying to get over that hump.”
At this point, the hump is large enough to dwarf The Hill, and David Beaty, the first-year head coach facing the Sisyphean task of getting the Jayhawks over it, has no illusions about the magnitude of the job ahead. Before the then–Texas A&M assistant accepted the KU head-coaching job in December, Beaty had already served two separate, short-lived stints in Lawrence as an assistant under predecessors Mangino and Gill, which allowed him to glimpse the program both in better times and at its nadir, respectively. The buzzwords Beaty and his staff drilled into their new charges this spring (urgency, competition, process) are central tenets of Rebuilding 101, a course many of the older players on the team have sat through before. Kansas fans blessed (or cursed) with longer memories have seen the cycle repeat many times over, only to always watch the boulder roll back to the bottom of the hill.
Beaty is well aware that his tenure is beginning at a moment when any semblance of momentum has long since vanished. Expectations are nonexistent; apathy is the rule. What will it take to convince the patrons of a program that’s subsisted in a rebuilding mode for as long as Kansas has that the other side of the hill is actually attainable?
“Think about it, if you [were] a student and the football team was losing, who’d want to see them play? That’s being honest,” says defensive end Ben Goodman, one of four fifth-year seniors on the 2015 roster who were on hand to watch both of the previous administrations unravel. “We have to change that environment by going out and winning. Because football is America’s game. No matter where you are in the world, if the football team is good, people will support it....” (
read the rest of the story in the link in the title or here)