Detailing why Kansas’ scholarship debt makes it the toughest Power 5 coaching job
Max Olson Jul 20, 2018
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David Beaty was hired to fix Kansas football. Three years later, so was Jeff Long.
In Long’s first few months on the job, the Jayhawks’ new athletic director must diagnose why this program has become so uncompetitive in the Big 12 over the past decade. And he must decide whether Beaty, his fourth-year head coach, is the man with the plan to fix it.
“It’s time to break the cycle,” Long said at his introductory news conference last week. “It’s not gonna be easy.”
Before he makes any decisions, Long must fully understand the scholarship crisis that Beaty inherited when he took over the program in 2015. Because calling it disastrous might be an understatement.
Kansas’ scholarship problem, created by former head coach Charlie Weis, his botched blueprint and a long list of complicating factors, has made this by far the hardest coaching job at the Power 5 level. There are few other head coaches in FBS dealing with the kind of roster problems that Beaty has spent more than three years fighting.
“We’ve had to be very creative since we’ve got here. I daresay this just may be the most creative staff in the history of the game,” Beaty told The Athletic, chuckling as he said it. “I’ve gotta laugh, because if I don’t, I’ll cry.”
The Jayhawks are hoping to have 70 true scholarship players on the roster this fall, which puts them 15 players under the 85-man limit. That 70 includes many players who arrived as walk-ons whom Beaty and his staff have developed.
Why is it that Beaty remains 15 scholarships short entering his fourth year on the job? Because a program needs a ton of good fortune to overcome that debt. It needs recruiting classes that pay off big. It needs to avoid injuries. It needs a high level of retention. It needs a plan, sure, but it also needs so many things to go right. A lot has gone right at Kansas during Beaty’s tenure. But his 3-33 record does not reflect much progress, and it has him sitting on college football’s hottest hot seat.
Beaty has long avoided talking openly about Kansas’ scholarship crisis. He does not want to make any excuses or make it about himself. But the man needs more time. As he enters his decisive fourth season, working with a new AD and feeling the win-now pressure, he understands he can’t wait any longer. He’s ready to start explaining — before it’s too late.
The number that stands out most is 38. That’s how many returning scholarship players Beaty inherited when he started at Kansas in 2015.
During that first offseason, 10 scholarship players left the program. Several players took medical retirements. Running back Corey Avery and receiver Rodriguez Coleman were dismissed. Receiver Nigel King went pro, and safety Isaiah Johnson went to South Carolina as a graduate transfer. Beaty’s first Kansas team ended up having as many newcomers as returning players.
“It was a surprise,” Beaty said. “We were told that it was a little bit different than that.”
Weis had tried to fix the Jayhawks quickly with too many junior college transfers, and his plan imploded. He took over in 2012, dismissed more than 20 players from the program for a variety of reasons and replaced them primarily with transfers. This was reckless, short-term thinking.
In the recruiting classes of 2012 and 2013, Weis and his staff brought in a combined 27 junior college transfers. Only two were academic qualifiers coming out of high school. Fourteen did not graduate, and 10 — including touted signees Marquel Combs, Chris Martin and Kevin Short — never saw the field. And then, by the end of 2014, they were all gone. So was Weis. Going into 2015, only 12 of Weis’ first 56 signees were still on the roster.
Former Kansas defensive end Ben Goodman played through the entire Weis era. He could tell when all those two-year players were failing to pan out that the program was about to be in trouble.
“I guess he was trying to go the Bill Snyder way, which was understandable,” Goodman said, referring to the longtime Kansas State coach. “Bill was always winning. But Charlie didn’t have the formula. He had bits and pieces of the formula of what he thought was going to work. And also, honestly, junior college players are not always ready like you think they are. Charlie wanted to win now and prove himself and prove he could win in college football. But it just didn’t work out like that at all.”
And this was the result: When Beaty began his first season at Kansas, after furiously recruiting to fill as many spots as possible, he had just 68 true scholarship players. He got that number up to 77 in 2016, but it dropped to 72 scholarship players last fall. And it’s important to put those numbers into perspective.
When USC was penalized with scholarship reductions by the NCAA as a result of the Reggie Bush case, the Trojans were capped at 75 scholarships from 2012 to 2014. Penn State was initially going to be restricted to 65 scholarships for a four-year period as part of the NCAA’s unprecedented 2012 punishment for the Jerry Sandusky scandal, but that penalty was later reduced. The Nittany Lions got back to 85 scholarships by 2016.
The scholarship crisis at Kansas is not the result of any harsh NCAA sanctions. Shortsighted recruiting and indefensible roster mismanagement during the Weis era put the program deeply in debt from a talent perspective.
“It was basically like getting the death penalty,” Goodman said.
The difference? Kansas’ suffering was entirely self-inflicted.
No first-time head coach would be sufficiently prepared to take on that problem, but Beaty was hired to be a roster builder. As wide receivers coach at Texas A&M, he was one of the nation’s best at recruiting the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. With his three years of previous experience coaching in Lawrence, he knew how to recruit to KU.
And though his time under Mark Mangino proved to him that winning at Kansas was not impossible, Beaty understood it would take a long time to rebuild the roster the right way.
“We knew our plan was to build this thing around high school players and the development of high school players,” he said. “But we realized very quickly that there’s no way it could be simply high school football players and that’s it. It was impossible. So we had to retool our plan.
“We can do one of two things. We can bitch, moan and complain about it. Or we can work hard to fix it.”
The rule is simple: You can’t sign more than 25 scholarship players a year. And to get from 38 to 85, you need a lot more than 25 a year to begin closing the gap. So Beaty and his Kansas staff have had to get creative.
The tactic that’s yielded the most success thus far: blueshirts. This is a strange practice, one introduced years ago by New Mexico State’s football and compliance staffs. Blueshirt players pay for their tuition and housing in the summer and are put on scholarship on the first day of school. By not signing a national letter of intent before beginning classes, they’re counted toward the following year’s recruiting class. But unlike a grayshirt player, they get to enroll and play right away.
To qualify for a blueshirt, though, they technically cannot be recruited by Kansas. How exactly do you add a player without triggering his recruitment? The prospect can’t make an official visit. The coaches can’t have any in-person, off-campus visits with that prospect. They can’t send him a written scholarship offer or a National Letter of Intent, either. Instead, it takes unofficial campus visits, calls and texts to secure these prospects.
All in all, it’s a bizarre workaround. But at least five of Kansas’ starters last season — Hakeem Adeniji, Andru Tovi, Larry Hughes, Mike Lee and Cole Moos — joined the program as blueshirt players. Graduate transfers Corey King, Marcquis Roberts and Denzell Evans came in that way, too. The staff has taken around eight blueshirt players each year. They need all the extra help they can get.
Another method to help catch up: persuading players to walk on for two years and putting them on full scholarship for the final three. This helps because after two years, that scholarship does not count toward the 25-player annual limit. For walk-ons paying in-state tuition (roughly $10,000 a year), three years of cost-of-attendance stipend money can help offset those costs. Kansas has found a handful of players who were looking at FCS and Division II offers and willing to accept that deal.
“We looked at those guys and said: Is this guy better than the dude we have here?” Beaty said. “If he is, it’s probably less expensive for him to come here than it is for him to go to a Division II school if we think he might be able to develop.”
They’ve also tried to find graduate transfers who are willing to pay their way for the first semester and then be put on post-graduate aid to get their master’s degree. The Jayhawks lucked out last year in finding one in Nebraska transfer Zach Hannon, who logged six starts on the offensive line.
No other Big 12 team needs these kinds of ploys to reload its roster.
All of it can be challenging to track, too. Throughout his tenure, Beaty has preferred not to publicly identify how many of his players are true scholarship players and which ones are actually walk-ons. Even his Kansas players admit they don’t totally know who’s who.
“Some guys I think are scholarship guys and I don’t even realize they’re walk-ons,” receiver Steven Sims said. “Our walk-ons get treated exactly the same.”
Jayhawks receiver Steven Sims praises the equal treatment that players on the Kansas roster receive.
Beaty has had to take junior college transfers to address needs, but the Kansas coaching staff knows it must be smarter about that than Weis was. They seek players with three-plus years of eligibility, and 13 of the first 24 JUCO transfers Beaty signed were academic qualifiers.
Kansas can’t get back to being competitive in the Big 12, though, on shortcuts alone. The development of high school players must be the foundation. Beaty and his coaches have managed to find some good ones. Three-star defensive end Dorance Armstrong came in at 6 feet 4 and 212 pounds and grew into an All-Big 12 selection and NFL fourth-round pick. Sims and running back Khalil Herbert were under-the-radar steals. Freshmen Corione Harris and Pooka Williams are two of the highest-rated signees in school history. The Jayhawks have a pipeline to Louisiana thanks to assistant Tony Hull and still do a strong job digging up gems in Texas.
But how can anyone recruit well and keep kids on board in the midst of all that losing? How do you get Big 12-caliber guys to side with Kansas over any other Power 5 offers? In an ideal world, this roster would be loaded up with high-potential high schoolers. In reality, this rebuild requires a lot of ingenuity. Beaty and his coaches have been chasing every possible answer to getting one man closer to 85.
“When you’re in a hole like that,” Kansas linebacker Joe Dineen said, “you’ve got to do everything you can to get out of it.”
Kansas needs to get as many true scholarship players as possible onto the roster. And then it needs to persuade all of them to stay, because the key to actually fixing the Jayhawks is retention. The scholarship crisis cannot improve if as many players are leaving the program as are joining each year.
In college roster-building parlance, the 25 players in their first year on scholarship are called “initial counters.” If Kansas loses one of those players, Beaty points out, the problem compounds. The Jayhawks lose a much-needed body as well as the initial counter.
“I had to make sure we didn’t lose kids,” Beaty said. “We couldn’t lose kids to quitting. We couldn’t lose kids to grades. We darn sure could not lose them to trouble. We had to protect those golden initials. We had to get the most out of them.”
Beaty tailored the Jayhawks’ internal culture around that objective: Keep players out of trouble by turning them into better people. He says his book on player development and education is “a mile thick” now at nearly 80 pages. They cover consent, harassment, crime, drugs, alcohol, anything and everything that can get them kicked out.
“He teaches us how to be better men before we even talk about football,” Sims said. “He teaches us a lot of life lessons. I appreciate him for that.”
The Jayhawks have turned around the program’s Academic Progress Rate, which had slipped to a dangerous score of 936 because of issues in Weis’ final year. Teams need to stay above 930 to avoid penalties, and Kansas football’s average semester APR is 960 since Beaty showed up. They graduated 38 of the 41 players they inherited from Weis. And Kansas players are staying out of the police blotter. As one Big 12 coach remarked with admiration: “You never hear one issue about his players. The culture is right.”
They haven’t kept everyone. The dismissal of Avery, Kansas’ leading rusher as a freshman in 2014, over a stolen laptop sent a message about their culture in progress. Avery transferred to Sam Houston State and became a three-time all-conference selection, rushing for 3,300 yards and 39 scores. As badly as the Jayhawks needed him, Beaty can’t make exceptions out of desperation.
He gathered his seniors in that first year and promised if they helped him establish that culture, he’d never forget them. Goodman, one of his 2015 captains, skipped Beaty’s first team meeting and wasn’t going to winter workouts. He was planning to grad transfer to Texas or Oklahoma State. Beaty set up a meeting and made his plea.
“He called me into his office and said he needed me, he wanted to lean on me, he wanted me to be the leader of the team,” Goodman said. “He really wanted that for me. I could see how sincere he was. I can read BS from people. He was very sincere. He was a man of his word. He really embraced the players and leaned on the players.”
The difference, Goodman admits, was stark. When asked about Weis, he says flatly: “We weren’t for the previous coach.” Beaty held Tuesday meetings with the team leaders to let them pick the weekly uniform combinations and present their ideas and issues. He fought for them to get Kansas’ outdated facilities renovated, from a brand-new locker room to a dedicated indoor practice facility. A $300 million renovation of Memorial Stadium comes next. He invested in the player-coach bond and backed up all his talk.
Goodman is back home in Beaumont, Texas, working for an energy company but made the trip for KU’s spring game this year. Goodman said Beaty showed him as much love as all their NFL players, even sending him a handwritten personal note thanking him for visiting.
“It shows his true character,” Goodman said. “He really cares. He really cares about the program and the players.”
It’s that warmness that helps explain why guys like Dineen and defensive tackle Daniel Wise, the Jayhawks’ preseason All-Big 12 selections, have stuck around. They could easily walk away from all the losing and transfer. Beaty says they’re talented enough to play for anybody. They say they stayed put out of loyalty to their head coach, their teammates and their belief that the turnaround is coming.
“I’d be lying to you if I said it wasn’t a little bit of a roller coaster,” Dineen said of his first four years. “But roller coasters are kinda fun sometimes.”
Ask Kansas players about the scholarship debt, and, like their coach, they deflect. No excuses. But over and over again, they’ve had to confront the frustrating side effects. Not enough players means more reps which means more injuries. True freshmen have had to play significant roles before their bodies were physically prepared for the beating. More injuries mean a greater likelihood of players needing to take medical retirements.
Kansas’ rate of attrition under Beaty hasn’t been awful — more than 60 percent of his signees from the 2015-2017 classes have earned starts — but when there’s no room for misses, every single player who departs makes this rebuild more difficult.
“Regardless of what our numbers are,” Wise said, “we’re gonna fight the long fight. We’re gonna deal with what we have and make the best of it.”
But there are lots of not-so-subtle reminders of the daily roster struggle. When the depth chart is that thin, Kansas’ starters end up practicing against walk-ons all week while the rest of their Big 12 foes are preparing against more talented backups.
“So we’re not getting that good look that we need before we face Oklahoma, Texas, Baylor, all those teams,” Goodman said. “We’re not getting that look we need. It’s easy to win against those guys in practice. It’s not as easy to win on Saturdays. It’s really fool’s gold.”
They simply do not have enough.
How much more time does Beaty need to pull off his plan?
He likes to say the results are closer than they appear. He hopes he’s right about that but knows realistically the process is not close to complete.
“We need to get to 85 and then cycle through for it to be able to be like a normal program,” Beaty said. “It’s coming. We just need time. Because the truth is, to get it back to 85, it’s gonna be another three years now. It’s gonna take a while.
“You’ve just got to stay the course because, even if it hurts a little bit more this year and next, it’s better to do that than the alternative.”
David Beaty has a clear plan to restock and rebuild Kansas football, but he knows the plan will take more time.
Based on what he witnessed playing through the disastrous Weis era and Beaty’s debut season, Goodman offers the following argument: Give Beaty five years, because the first two weren’t his fault.
“Last year should’ve qualified as his first year, honestly,” Goodman said. “I understand an AD has to do what he has to do, but you have to give somebody a shot. You can’t fire three coaches in eight years.”
Consider all the components of the job Beaty took on that have little to do with scheme or coaching. The recruiting and roster building and culture management required to start making up the scholarship deficit is a time-consuming and intense challenge. Beaty and his staff have to do so many things right before they even hit the field to coach their players. And then they have to go play in a conference that sent eight teams to bowl games in 2017.
Texas coach Tom Herman is one of Beaty’s closest friends in the profession, so he’s not exactly unbiased on this topic. But he believes wholeheartedly that the Jayhawks are better off staying the course than starting over and potentially getting worse.
“I can’t fathom a better coach to take on that challenge than David Beaty,” Herman told The Athletic. “With what he inherited — the limited number of scholarships he inherited, the facilities he inherited, the apathy he inherited — he has stayed positive the entire time. You’re not gonna find a nicer man in the profession. He would give you the shirt off his back. He deserves all the time in the world to right that ship. Because it’s gonna take a while, especially given what he inherited. I think he’s earned it, I think he deserves it and I hope he gets it.”
Kansas men’s basketball coach Bill Self echoed those sentiments after Long’s introductory news conference, reminding reporters that KU football is not an overnight fix and that “sometimes you’re making progress a lot more than fans see.”
Has Beaty handled the job perfectly? Of course not. His teams have been blown out too many times (21 losses by 20-plus points) and been too sloppy. The Jayhawks’ minus-38 turnover margin since Beaty took over is second worst in FBS. He’s brought in touted transfers who’ve busted. He’s struggled to find a difference-maker at quarterback. There’s going to be trial and error when you’re a first-time head coach. The problem is, in this particular job, every little error threatens to make this process substantially harder.
Beaty did not take this job for the money. According to the USA TODAY coaches salary database, his $1.7 million salary makes him the second-lowest-paid head coach at the Power 5 level, ahead of only Cal’s Justin Wilcox. Beaty didn’t take this job out of some naive belief that it wouldn’t be that tough. He took the job because he genuinely believes this is a special place to coach.
“I love this program. I love it. I love it with all my heart,” Beaty said. “I love these people in this state, and I love this university. I’m not motivated by money or position. I’m motivated by these people deserving better. They deserve better. And it never should’ve gotten to this point. My biggest disappointment is I haven’t been able to do it sooner. If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that, man, there’s some things that you can’t fix in a fast way. You just can’t. There’s a process that forces you to be patient.”
We’re about to find out just how much patience the leadership at Kansas can maintain through all the losing. It’s up to Long to evaluate all of the challenges involved and figure out whether another coach can execute a better, faster solution. And he must determine whether that coach is actually willing to take the Kansas job and stay there. How many wins does Beaty need to win over his new boss? It’s hard to say. To make a case for granting Beaty one more year, the Jayhawks will need to show undeniable progress.
“Our conversations have been terrific,” Beaty said. “Now he’s got to do what’s best for this university, and I get that. I totally get that. We want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to put this place in the best position possible, regardless, to make sure it doesn’t take a step back. We’re gonna plan on being a part of it and continuing the rise.”
If Kansas pulls the plug on the Beaty era this fall, more players will leave and the next coach will inevitably need more time. But, eventually, this roster will be in far better shape. Eventually, Kansas will close in on having 85 true scholarship players. And whether they’ve fired him or not, they will have Beaty to thank.
Max Olson Jul 20, 2018
David Beaty was hired to fix Kansas football. Three years later, so was Jeff Long.
In Long’s first few months on the job, the Jayhawks’ new athletic director must diagnose why this program has become so uncompetitive in the Big 12 over the past decade. And he must decide whether Beaty, his fourth-year head coach, is the man with the plan to fix it.
“It’s time to break the cycle,” Long said at his introductory news conference last week. “It’s not gonna be easy.”
Before he makes any decisions, Long must fully understand the scholarship crisis that Beaty inherited when he took over the program in 2015. Because calling it disastrous might be an understatement.
Kansas’ scholarship problem, created by former head coach Charlie Weis, his botched blueprint and a long list of complicating factors, has made this by far the hardest coaching job at the Power 5 level. There are few other head coaches in FBS dealing with the kind of roster problems that Beaty has spent more than three years fighting.
“We’ve had to be very creative since we’ve got here. I daresay this just may be the most creative staff in the history of the game,” Beaty told The Athletic, chuckling as he said it. “I’ve gotta laugh, because if I don’t, I’ll cry.”
The Jayhawks are hoping to have 70 true scholarship players on the roster this fall, which puts them 15 players under the 85-man limit. That 70 includes many players who arrived as walk-ons whom Beaty and his staff have developed.
Why is it that Beaty remains 15 scholarships short entering his fourth year on the job? Because a program needs a ton of good fortune to overcome that debt. It needs recruiting classes that pay off big. It needs to avoid injuries. It needs a high level of retention. It needs a plan, sure, but it also needs so many things to go right. A lot has gone right at Kansas during Beaty’s tenure. But his 3-33 record does not reflect much progress, and it has him sitting on college football’s hottest hot seat.
Beaty has long avoided talking openly about Kansas’ scholarship crisis. He does not want to make any excuses or make it about himself. But the man needs more time. As he enters his decisive fourth season, working with a new AD and feeling the win-now pressure, he understands he can’t wait any longer. He’s ready to start explaining — before it’s too late.
The number that stands out most is 38. That’s how many returning scholarship players Beaty inherited when he started at Kansas in 2015.
During that first offseason, 10 scholarship players left the program. Several players took medical retirements. Running back Corey Avery and receiver Rodriguez Coleman were dismissed. Receiver Nigel King went pro, and safety Isaiah Johnson went to South Carolina as a graduate transfer. Beaty’s first Kansas team ended up having as many newcomers as returning players.
“It was a surprise,” Beaty said. “We were told that it was a little bit different than that.”
Weis had tried to fix the Jayhawks quickly with too many junior college transfers, and his plan imploded. He took over in 2012, dismissed more than 20 players from the program for a variety of reasons and replaced them primarily with transfers. This was reckless, short-term thinking.
In the recruiting classes of 2012 and 2013, Weis and his staff brought in a combined 27 junior college transfers. Only two were academic qualifiers coming out of high school. Fourteen did not graduate, and 10 — including touted signees Marquel Combs, Chris Martin and Kevin Short — never saw the field. And then, by the end of 2014, they were all gone. So was Weis. Going into 2015, only 12 of Weis’ first 56 signees were still on the roster.
Former Kansas defensive end Ben Goodman played through the entire Weis era. He could tell when all those two-year players were failing to pan out that the program was about to be in trouble.
“I guess he was trying to go the Bill Snyder way, which was understandable,” Goodman said, referring to the longtime Kansas State coach. “Bill was always winning. But Charlie didn’t have the formula. He had bits and pieces of the formula of what he thought was going to work. And also, honestly, junior college players are not always ready like you think they are. Charlie wanted to win now and prove himself and prove he could win in college football. But it just didn’t work out like that at all.”
And this was the result: When Beaty began his first season at Kansas, after furiously recruiting to fill as many spots as possible, he had just 68 true scholarship players. He got that number up to 77 in 2016, but it dropped to 72 scholarship players last fall. And it’s important to put those numbers into perspective.
When USC was penalized with scholarship reductions by the NCAA as a result of the Reggie Bush case, the Trojans were capped at 75 scholarships from 2012 to 2014. Penn State was initially going to be restricted to 65 scholarships for a four-year period as part of the NCAA’s unprecedented 2012 punishment for the Jerry Sandusky scandal, but that penalty was later reduced. The Nittany Lions got back to 85 scholarships by 2016.
The scholarship crisis at Kansas is not the result of any harsh NCAA sanctions. Shortsighted recruiting and indefensible roster mismanagement during the Weis era put the program deeply in debt from a talent perspective.
“It was basically like getting the death penalty,” Goodman said.
The difference? Kansas’ suffering was entirely self-inflicted.
No first-time head coach would be sufficiently prepared to take on that problem, but Beaty was hired to be a roster builder. As wide receivers coach at Texas A&M, he was one of the nation’s best at recruiting the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. With his three years of previous experience coaching in Lawrence, he knew how to recruit to KU.
And though his time under Mark Mangino proved to him that winning at Kansas was not impossible, Beaty understood it would take a long time to rebuild the roster the right way.
“We knew our plan was to build this thing around high school players and the development of high school players,” he said. “But we realized very quickly that there’s no way it could be simply high school football players and that’s it. It was impossible. So we had to retool our plan.
“We can do one of two things. We can bitch, moan and complain about it. Or we can work hard to fix it.”
The rule is simple: You can’t sign more than 25 scholarship players a year. And to get from 38 to 85, you need a lot more than 25 a year to begin closing the gap. So Beaty and his Kansas staff have had to get creative.
The tactic that’s yielded the most success thus far: blueshirts. This is a strange practice, one introduced years ago by New Mexico State’s football and compliance staffs. Blueshirt players pay for their tuition and housing in the summer and are put on scholarship on the first day of school. By not signing a national letter of intent before beginning classes, they’re counted toward the following year’s recruiting class. But unlike a grayshirt player, they get to enroll and play right away.
To qualify for a blueshirt, though, they technically cannot be recruited by Kansas. How exactly do you add a player without triggering his recruitment? The prospect can’t make an official visit. The coaches can’t have any in-person, off-campus visits with that prospect. They can’t send him a written scholarship offer or a National Letter of Intent, either. Instead, it takes unofficial campus visits, calls and texts to secure these prospects.
All in all, it’s a bizarre workaround. But at least five of Kansas’ starters last season — Hakeem Adeniji, Andru Tovi, Larry Hughes, Mike Lee and Cole Moos — joined the program as blueshirt players. Graduate transfers Corey King, Marcquis Roberts and Denzell Evans came in that way, too. The staff has taken around eight blueshirt players each year. They need all the extra help they can get.
Another method to help catch up: persuading players to walk on for two years and putting them on full scholarship for the final three. This helps because after two years, that scholarship does not count toward the 25-player annual limit. For walk-ons paying in-state tuition (roughly $10,000 a year), three years of cost-of-attendance stipend money can help offset those costs. Kansas has found a handful of players who were looking at FCS and Division II offers and willing to accept that deal.
“We looked at those guys and said: Is this guy better than the dude we have here?” Beaty said. “If he is, it’s probably less expensive for him to come here than it is for him to go to a Division II school if we think he might be able to develop.”
They’ve also tried to find graduate transfers who are willing to pay their way for the first semester and then be put on post-graduate aid to get their master’s degree. The Jayhawks lucked out last year in finding one in Nebraska transfer Zach Hannon, who logged six starts on the offensive line.
No other Big 12 team needs these kinds of ploys to reload its roster.
All of it can be challenging to track, too. Throughout his tenure, Beaty has preferred not to publicly identify how many of his players are true scholarship players and which ones are actually walk-ons. Even his Kansas players admit they don’t totally know who’s who.
“Some guys I think are scholarship guys and I don’t even realize they’re walk-ons,” receiver Steven Sims said. “Our walk-ons get treated exactly the same.”
Jayhawks receiver Steven Sims praises the equal treatment that players on the Kansas roster receive.
Beaty has had to take junior college transfers to address needs, but the Kansas coaching staff knows it must be smarter about that than Weis was. They seek players with three-plus years of eligibility, and 13 of the first 24 JUCO transfers Beaty signed were academic qualifiers.
Kansas can’t get back to being competitive in the Big 12, though, on shortcuts alone. The development of high school players must be the foundation. Beaty and his coaches have managed to find some good ones. Three-star defensive end Dorance Armstrong came in at 6 feet 4 and 212 pounds and grew into an All-Big 12 selection and NFL fourth-round pick. Sims and running back Khalil Herbert were under-the-radar steals. Freshmen Corione Harris and Pooka Williams are two of the highest-rated signees in school history. The Jayhawks have a pipeline to Louisiana thanks to assistant Tony Hull and still do a strong job digging up gems in Texas.
But how can anyone recruit well and keep kids on board in the midst of all that losing? How do you get Big 12-caliber guys to side with Kansas over any other Power 5 offers? In an ideal world, this roster would be loaded up with high-potential high schoolers. In reality, this rebuild requires a lot of ingenuity. Beaty and his coaches have been chasing every possible answer to getting one man closer to 85.
“When you’re in a hole like that,” Kansas linebacker Joe Dineen said, “you’ve got to do everything you can to get out of it.”
Kansas needs to get as many true scholarship players as possible onto the roster. And then it needs to persuade all of them to stay, because the key to actually fixing the Jayhawks is retention. The scholarship crisis cannot improve if as many players are leaving the program as are joining each year.
In college roster-building parlance, the 25 players in their first year on scholarship are called “initial counters.” If Kansas loses one of those players, Beaty points out, the problem compounds. The Jayhawks lose a much-needed body as well as the initial counter.
“I had to make sure we didn’t lose kids,” Beaty said. “We couldn’t lose kids to quitting. We couldn’t lose kids to grades. We darn sure could not lose them to trouble. We had to protect those golden initials. We had to get the most out of them.”
Beaty tailored the Jayhawks’ internal culture around that objective: Keep players out of trouble by turning them into better people. He says his book on player development and education is “a mile thick” now at nearly 80 pages. They cover consent, harassment, crime, drugs, alcohol, anything and everything that can get them kicked out.
“He teaches us how to be better men before we even talk about football,” Sims said. “He teaches us a lot of life lessons. I appreciate him for that.”
The Jayhawks have turned around the program’s Academic Progress Rate, which had slipped to a dangerous score of 936 because of issues in Weis’ final year. Teams need to stay above 930 to avoid penalties, and Kansas football’s average semester APR is 960 since Beaty showed up. They graduated 38 of the 41 players they inherited from Weis. And Kansas players are staying out of the police blotter. As one Big 12 coach remarked with admiration: “You never hear one issue about his players. The culture is right.”
They haven’t kept everyone. The dismissal of Avery, Kansas’ leading rusher as a freshman in 2014, over a stolen laptop sent a message about their culture in progress. Avery transferred to Sam Houston State and became a three-time all-conference selection, rushing for 3,300 yards and 39 scores. As badly as the Jayhawks needed him, Beaty can’t make exceptions out of desperation.
He gathered his seniors in that first year and promised if they helped him establish that culture, he’d never forget them. Goodman, one of his 2015 captains, skipped Beaty’s first team meeting and wasn’t going to winter workouts. He was planning to grad transfer to Texas or Oklahoma State. Beaty set up a meeting and made his plea.
“He called me into his office and said he needed me, he wanted to lean on me, he wanted me to be the leader of the team,” Goodman said. “He really wanted that for me. I could see how sincere he was. I can read BS from people. He was very sincere. He was a man of his word. He really embraced the players and leaned on the players.”
The difference, Goodman admits, was stark. When asked about Weis, he says flatly: “We weren’t for the previous coach.” Beaty held Tuesday meetings with the team leaders to let them pick the weekly uniform combinations and present their ideas and issues. He fought for them to get Kansas’ outdated facilities renovated, from a brand-new locker room to a dedicated indoor practice facility. A $300 million renovation of Memorial Stadium comes next. He invested in the player-coach bond and backed up all his talk.
Goodman is back home in Beaumont, Texas, working for an energy company but made the trip for KU’s spring game this year. Goodman said Beaty showed him as much love as all their NFL players, even sending him a handwritten personal note thanking him for visiting.
“It shows his true character,” Goodman said. “He really cares. He really cares about the program and the players.”
It’s that warmness that helps explain why guys like Dineen and defensive tackle Daniel Wise, the Jayhawks’ preseason All-Big 12 selections, have stuck around. They could easily walk away from all the losing and transfer. Beaty says they’re talented enough to play for anybody. They say they stayed put out of loyalty to their head coach, their teammates and their belief that the turnaround is coming.
“I’d be lying to you if I said it wasn’t a little bit of a roller coaster,” Dineen said of his first four years. “But roller coasters are kinda fun sometimes.”
Ask Kansas players about the scholarship debt, and, like their coach, they deflect. No excuses. But over and over again, they’ve had to confront the frustrating side effects. Not enough players means more reps which means more injuries. True freshmen have had to play significant roles before their bodies were physically prepared for the beating. More injuries mean a greater likelihood of players needing to take medical retirements.
Kansas’ rate of attrition under Beaty hasn’t been awful — more than 60 percent of his signees from the 2015-2017 classes have earned starts — but when there’s no room for misses, every single player who departs makes this rebuild more difficult.
“Regardless of what our numbers are,” Wise said, “we’re gonna fight the long fight. We’re gonna deal with what we have and make the best of it.”
But there are lots of not-so-subtle reminders of the daily roster struggle. When the depth chart is that thin, Kansas’ starters end up practicing against walk-ons all week while the rest of their Big 12 foes are preparing against more talented backups.
“So we’re not getting that good look that we need before we face Oklahoma, Texas, Baylor, all those teams,” Goodman said. “We’re not getting that look we need. It’s easy to win against those guys in practice. It’s not as easy to win on Saturdays. It’s really fool’s gold.”
They simply do not have enough.
How much more time does Beaty need to pull off his plan?
He likes to say the results are closer than they appear. He hopes he’s right about that but knows realistically the process is not close to complete.
“We need to get to 85 and then cycle through for it to be able to be like a normal program,” Beaty said. “It’s coming. We just need time. Because the truth is, to get it back to 85, it’s gonna be another three years now. It’s gonna take a while.
“You’ve just got to stay the course because, even if it hurts a little bit more this year and next, it’s better to do that than the alternative.”
David Beaty has a clear plan to restock and rebuild Kansas football, but he knows the plan will take more time.
Based on what he witnessed playing through the disastrous Weis era and Beaty’s debut season, Goodman offers the following argument: Give Beaty five years, because the first two weren’t his fault.
“Last year should’ve qualified as his first year, honestly,” Goodman said. “I understand an AD has to do what he has to do, but you have to give somebody a shot. You can’t fire three coaches in eight years.”
Consider all the components of the job Beaty took on that have little to do with scheme or coaching. The recruiting and roster building and culture management required to start making up the scholarship deficit is a time-consuming and intense challenge. Beaty and his staff have to do so many things right before they even hit the field to coach their players. And then they have to go play in a conference that sent eight teams to bowl games in 2017.
Texas coach Tom Herman is one of Beaty’s closest friends in the profession, so he’s not exactly unbiased on this topic. But he believes wholeheartedly that the Jayhawks are better off staying the course than starting over and potentially getting worse.
“I can’t fathom a better coach to take on that challenge than David Beaty,” Herman told The Athletic. “With what he inherited — the limited number of scholarships he inherited, the facilities he inherited, the apathy he inherited — he has stayed positive the entire time. You’re not gonna find a nicer man in the profession. He would give you the shirt off his back. He deserves all the time in the world to right that ship. Because it’s gonna take a while, especially given what he inherited. I think he’s earned it, I think he deserves it and I hope he gets it.”
Kansas men’s basketball coach Bill Self echoed those sentiments after Long’s introductory news conference, reminding reporters that KU football is not an overnight fix and that “sometimes you’re making progress a lot more than fans see.”
Has Beaty handled the job perfectly? Of course not. His teams have been blown out too many times (21 losses by 20-plus points) and been too sloppy. The Jayhawks’ minus-38 turnover margin since Beaty took over is second worst in FBS. He’s brought in touted transfers who’ve busted. He’s struggled to find a difference-maker at quarterback. There’s going to be trial and error when you’re a first-time head coach. The problem is, in this particular job, every little error threatens to make this process substantially harder.
Beaty did not take this job for the money. According to the USA TODAY coaches salary database, his $1.7 million salary makes him the second-lowest-paid head coach at the Power 5 level, ahead of only Cal’s Justin Wilcox. Beaty didn’t take this job out of some naive belief that it wouldn’t be that tough. He took the job because he genuinely believes this is a special place to coach.
“I love this program. I love it. I love it with all my heart,” Beaty said. “I love these people in this state, and I love this university. I’m not motivated by money or position. I’m motivated by these people deserving better. They deserve better. And it never should’ve gotten to this point. My biggest disappointment is I haven’t been able to do it sooner. If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that, man, there’s some things that you can’t fix in a fast way. You just can’t. There’s a process that forces you to be patient.”
We’re about to find out just how much patience the leadership at Kansas can maintain through all the losing. It’s up to Long to evaluate all of the challenges involved and figure out whether another coach can execute a better, faster solution. And he must determine whether that coach is actually willing to take the Kansas job and stay there. How many wins does Beaty need to win over his new boss? It’s hard to say. To make a case for granting Beaty one more year, the Jayhawks will need to show undeniable progress.
“Our conversations have been terrific,” Beaty said. “Now he’s got to do what’s best for this university, and I get that. I totally get that. We want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to put this place in the best position possible, regardless, to make sure it doesn’t take a step back. We’re gonna plan on being a part of it and continuing the rise.”
If Kansas pulls the plug on the Beaty era this fall, more players will leave and the next coach will inevitably need more time. But, eventually, this roster will be in far better shape. Eventually, Kansas will close in on having 85 true scholarship players. And whether they’ve fired him or not, they will have Beaty to thank.
