Kansas has a new football coach. He played at a Midwestern Division III power before coaching at the same Midwestern Division III power before jumping to the MAC, where he had some success but not enough to be the kind of can’t-miss-sure-thing savant major programs target when they’re plumbing the ranks of mid-majordom.
This might sound familiar to Iowa State fans.
There are plenty upon plenty of differences between Lance Leipold and Matt Campbell, but the general idea behind the hiring of each was the same: Maybe this guy can make us competitive. He did it over in the Rust Belt. His downside seems low.
Kansas doesn’t want Campbell-level success. I mean, sure, they want it, but that’s not going to be the curve upon which Leipold is graded. Football is second fiddle at Kansas, if even second, and the Jayhawks have been such a laughingstock for the last decade that the real goal is likely to just not be a laughingstock.
But hey.
That was the goal at Iowa State too.
The differences between Iowa State and Kansas are many—one an ag school, one a liberal school; one a men’s basketball power, one happy to take whichever program is producing in the moment. But the similarities between Iowa State football and Kansas football aren’t insignificant. The former Big Eight rivals each joined the North Division in the newly-formed Big 12 in 1996, and while Iowa State’s managed more consistent competency, Kansas’s higher highs under Mark Mangino lift KU close to ISU in win total, with Kansas averaging 3.8 overall wins a year to Iowa State’s 5.0 since the Big 12’s creation. Neither has much in the way of historic greatness—Iowa State’s made sixteen bowl games, Kansas has made twelve; Iowa State has never won sole possession of a conference title, Kansas hasn’t done it since 1930. Each plays in difficult football recruiting territory and is the less successful of the two in-state Power Five programs. Iowa State has never been as much of a joke as Kansas has been at its worst (or so is my impression, perhaps I’m incorrect), but had Kansas’s 2007 run not occurred during that bizarre, no-true-champion season and had instead happened such that it was KU and Mizzou on the heels of Alabama or Florida or USC, we might think of that Kansas team as more than just one more quirk in a year loaded with quirks (it is rarely noted that Kansas has won twelve games in a season in a rather modern iteration of college football).
It’s worth remembering, too, that Campbell managed just three wins in his first season in Ames. Campbell was not a holy-shit-look-at-this-guy coach until 2017 at the earliest, and really not until this past fall in a major, he-would-be-a-no-brainer-for-Michigan way. Which goes to say that if Leipold goes down to Conway and loses to Coastal Carolina in his second game, that doesn’t mean this is the same old Kansas.
Leipold has his work cut out for him in Lawrence, inheriting a worse program than the bad one Campbell took on up in Ames with, again, a lesser record of recent decency (and a larger quantity of recent scandal). But the program can rise to a competitive level. The second-rate program in the state with the sorry history and no clear recruiting blueprint can rise and match points with Oklahoma or any other Big 12 big boy. It’s possible for Kansas. We know that because we learned it was possible at Iowa State.
