He pulled Kansas from 0-9 to a 9-4 bowl team, then turned his own best year into the bar he keeps missing. The offense still hums. The defense still bleeds 189 rushing yards per game, and Kansas led in the fourth quarter in four of its seven losses.

Inside: why the best coach Kansas has had since Mangino sits at No. 3, and the one thing that cools the seat.

Plus, The Market Read: the books have already filed Kansas in the bargain bin, and one number tells you whether to trust the record.

Before your group chat, grown adults dialed up a screeching modem to swap rumors and inform a stranger in Lubbock that he wouldn't know a Cover 2 if it tackled him.

The Athletic dug up where the madness started, and the punchline now coaches the defending national champions. In 1999, a 37-year-old Pitt recruiting coordinator named Curt Cignetti waved the boards off as "a lot of that isn't very credible," and twenty-six years later, that same man went 16-0 at the losingest program in the sport and told the world to Google him. On3 founder Shannon Terry remembers a community that policed itself, a generous gloss on what he also calls "a fistfight at all times." The relic I cannot stop thinking about is the 1999 rumor that FSU's Chris Weinke shredded his throwing hand in a bar brawl, a scoop one owner tried to confirm by phone, only to be answered by Weinke himself, laughing in the background.

This was social media 1.0 and the mother of every bad habit you have online, so go read it, then go remind t.u. it still stinks. [LINK]

There is exactly one thing Mark Harlan cannot abide: a thief.

The man who reports felonies

You may remember Utah's athletic director from the night BYU won 22-21.

A holding flag erased a game-ending sack, and Harlan, a man who does not normally bother with a postgame microphone, marched to the podium to report a felony. The game was "absolutely stolen," he announced, and he was disgusted by the lack of professionalism by the officials, one of whom he chased down on the field to say so. The Big 12 fined him forty grand and publicly reprimanded him for it.

I have watched plenty of men blow up at the zebras, but rarely one who set fire to forty thousand dollars and then apologized for the blaze by Sunday.

The first one through the door

Keep that man in mind, because he is the one who just signed Utah up as the first athletic department in the country to take private equity money, half a billion dollars of it.

This is not the KKR horror movie

First, calm down, because this is not the KKR horror movie you are picturing.

Nobody bought the department with borrowed money and started stripping it for parts. Otro Capital put cash into a new for-profit shell called Crimson Brand Partners, took a minority stake, and left the university foundation holding the majority and every call about teams and coaches. Here is the whole engine:

That last lever is the one that should keep you up at night.

The two brands that read the contract and ran

Now here is the line item our theft expert forgot to flag.

When the Big Ten floated a gentler version of the same idea, a minority stake sold to a California pension fund, Michigan and USC set it on fire, with Michigan's board calling it a "payday loan" and asking out loud whether selling off a piece of the league was a responsible thing to do at all. Two of the richest brands in the sport read the same contract and walked. Harlan held the door and curtsied.

Private equity makes people flinch for a reason: the last time the smart money swore it was only here to help, KKR bought Safeway in 1986 and cut so deep that a reporter won a Pulitzer for counting the wreckage.

Take it from the larceny expert

So you will forgive me if I do not take risk-management advice from a man who filed a police report over a penalty.

Harlan says he is "comfortable that our risks are covered." He said the ballgame was stolen, too.

He mistook a holding call for grand larceny and never heard the vault open behind him. Go count Utah's 19 teams, because the loudest lawman in the sport just left his own safe on the curb and told you to sleep tight. [LINK]

The University of Kentucky has solved a problem that didn’t exist: how does a man at a football game know he is at a football game?

Big Blue Nation just signed a three-year deal with an app called Hoot, built on what it calls "verified human presence," which is startup for a check-in, a thing your phone learned to do around 2009. Inside, you get Landings, which is Hoot for a map, and Echoes, which is Hoot for a video that vanishes. There is even HootMe, so you can text the guy two sections over without the burden of his number.

"We did not build Hoot to be another social app," says CEO Drew Gordon, who did in fact build another social app. The tell is a feature called HootDeals, where local businesses fire coupons at the verified humans standing nearby, because the product here was never “connection.” It was foot traffic.

Read it, then go stand in a stadium with sixty thousand strangers and marvel that Kentucky needed a geofence to prove you showed up. [LINK]

Go ahead and find the preseason magazine that files Kansas under Mixed, primed to bounce back. I will show you a writer who watched the wins and skipped the tape.

Here is the bounce-back team’s resume. Back-to-back 5-7 seasons. Bowl-ineligible two years running. A defense that could not protect a fourth-quarter lead if you spotted it in the fourth quarter. And a head coach who, instead of handing you the usual fog, walked to the podium after the season and graded himself failing. Lance Leipold said his team underachieved, by most people’s standards, and the man he was describing was himself.

When the coach is more honest about his team than the magazines are, that is your first tell.

Before anybody buries him, remember who dug Kansas out, because nobody else would touch the shovel.

Kansas was not bad in 2020. Kansas was a corpse. The Jayhawks went 0-9, the worst job in the Power Five, a program that had not posted a winning season since 2008, and that no sane coach wanted. Leipold took it and had it at 9-4 by 2023. That was the most wins in Lawrence since 2007, with back-to-back bowl trips for only the second time in school history. He did it the unglamorous way, developing players the blue bloods passed on and building a locker room that held.

This is a real head coach. Hold that thought, because the rest of this gets harder on him.

Do your job well enough, and you commit the only unforgivable sin in this business: you move the standard up to your own best day.

Leipold said it himself when they asked about the back-to-back bowl misses. The program’s rise, he allowed, has now become the expectation. Sit with that one. The man built the trap, then stood there describing it. Call it rare self-awareness or call it a confession. At Kansas, it is both. Nine and four stopped being a miracle and turned into the floor. Every step short of it now reads as a fall.

Look at the shape: up out of the rubble of 2021 to the 2023 peak, then two straight years bending back toward the floor, and a 2025 that barely clears even. Nothing on that chart is a crash. All of it is a slide. A slide is the meaner thing to coach your way out of, because nobody hits the alarm until it is already a cliff.

A team that quits is a talent problem. A team that stalls is a leadership problem, and Leipold would tell you that to your face.

The 2025 season did not get robbed, and that is the bad news.

When Florida State went 5-7, it at least had an alibi: plus-11 a game, a margin you could squint at and call unlucky. Kansas brought no alibi to the table. Plus 1.3 a game and a 2.88 SRS are the vital signs of a thoroughly average football team. There is no contender buried under the record waiting on a kind bounce. The Jayhawks lost where everyone loses, in the games that came down to the final drive. They lost nearly all of them.

Watch how the year broke down.

Beat the helpless, lose every coin flip, and 5-7 is not bad luck. It is a diagnosis.

You want the murder weapon? It is the defense, and it is not even hiding.

Nobody blows a fourth-quarter lead because the offense turned bashful. You blow it because you cannot get off the field. Kansas could not get off the field for five years running: 31.4 points allowed per game under Leipold. Set his whole tenure beside the only modern Kansas success and the man who built Iowa State out of the same junkyard, and the color-coding does the talking for me.

Start with the green, because Leipold earned every box of it. His offense beats both comps where it counts, on yards per play and yards per carry, and his teams protect the ball and stay out of the referee’s way. Now the red. This is the part that ends seasons. He trails the comp average in winning percentage, point differential, and SRS, and is the highest his team has ever climbed. Then there is the defense, and one row on it should keep him up at night. Kansas surrenders 189 rushing yards a game at 4.9 a carry. That is fifty yards and a full yard worse than either comp, and better than two rushing touchdowns a game, walking in untouched. You do not lose close games by accident when the other team can run on you at will.

The offense was never the patient. The defense is, and a defense is something a program can go buy on the open market.

So naturally, Kansas spent the winter repairing the side of the ball that already worked.

The headline move was Andy Kotelnicki, back to run the offense he built in 2023 before two years at Penn State. It is a terrific hire for a problem Kansas does not have. The defense still leaks 31 a game. The late leads still evaporate. Both got to keep their chairs while the offense got the whole offseason. And the most important seat on the roster sits empty, because Jalon Daniels finally aged out and the 2026 quarterback is a three-way audition among Cole Ballard, Isaiah Marshall, and a transfer from Rice that Leipold will not settle before camp.

I keep waiting for the part of this plan that touches the defense. It never shows up.

Leipold’s defense deserves a better lawyer than the optimists usually give it, so here is the case at full strength.

Close games are coin flips, and a team that dropped four of them by a single score is about as likely to win three next year as to lose four again, with nobody changing a thing. Kotelnicki’s return is a real reason to think the offense finishes the drives it fumbled away in 2025. And the man has banked the credit that only a builder banks. His locker room did not quit on him at 5-7, and holding a team together through a losing year is work that never lands in a box score.

Every word of that is true. Not one word of it is about the defense.

If the open questions are whether Kansas can finish and whether Kansas can travel, the 2026 schedule is a controlled experiment with a grudge.

This is about the worst draw available, and the buildings are in on it too. Phase II construction shrinks David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium to a fraction of its former size, and the Big 12 opener against Arizona State is staged in London. Add five true road trips, and Leipold has almost no home field left to hide behind. September is a stress test wearing a friendly smile.

Three dates tell you where the verdict lives.

The schedule will give him the tune-ups and then ask the only two questions on the test.

The number that matters is 5.5, the win total the books hung on Kansas, and the books are not sentimental.

FanDuel set the Jayhawks at five and a half: a hair of lean to the over at minus-154, with honest value waiting on the under at plus-126. It filed Kansas in the bargain bin alongside Cincinnati and Iowa. The futures are blunter. A national title ticket near plus-30000 is a typo with a payout. At more than one shop, the conference and Playoff markets are off the board entirely. That is the house declining, politely, to take the bet at all.

Save money on September.  The schedule prints wins over Long Island and Middle Tennessee and their friends, so do not let a tidy early record sell you a bowl team. The number flatters the roster until the road games come due.

The fade lives on the road.  Until a Leipold team closes a tight one away from Lawrence, the play is fading Kansas as a live dog in the buildings that decide the year, not buying an “over” propped up by cupcakes.

And no, none of this is a prediction that Kansas shows him the door, because the math points the other way.

The contract was written to keep Leipold, not to cage him. Firing him without cause runs the school roughly 80% of a deal worth about $5.5 million a year through the end of the decade. That is a brutal check to write on a program that just bet a nine-figure stadium on his future. The buyout pointed the other way, what he owes to walk out for somebody bigger, has dropped to about three million after May. In this market, that is a tip. Kansas built its money around the fear of losing him, and that old fear is now doing his job security a quiet favor.

The seat is hot because of the expectations and the calendar, not because anyone in Lawrence is reaching for the checkbook.

Here is the verdict, and it is not the wishy-washy mix magazines that are going to hand you.

Lance Leipold is a genuinely good head coach sitting on a seat he lit himself. The reading is a Trend, and it is hardening, because two straight 5-7 years with a defense that cannot protect a lead stopped being an accident a season ago. It is not Structural yet, because the offense is real and the coin flips regress toward even. The floor he poured does not crack over one bad October, either. The seam runs straight through the close game and road number, and I will tell you exactly where it snaps. Win a handful of those tight ones in 2026, and this was a Blip that fixed itself. Lose them again, and the slide becomes the address, and the best coach Kansas has had since Mangino walked out spends the last of the goodwill nine wins bought him.

Three things move this needle, and none of them is another 46-7 over some visiting also-ran.

Leipold told the truth about himself in November, which is more than the rest of the conference managed to do, and the truth was that he underachieved. I will believe the slide has stopped the day Kansas wins the games it is supposed to win on the road and in the last five minutes, the two places a good coach turns a hot seat cold. Until then, the honesty is lovely, and the scoreboard does not grade on honesty.

That's the issue. For the skimmers, here is what you just pretended to read.

Next: Wisconsin. Luke Fickell left Cincinnati a proven winner and took over the most dependable program in the Big Ten, a physical, run-first outfit that had gone bowling 22 straight years. Three seasons later, the Badgers score 12.8 points a game and just posted back-to-back losing seasons for the first time since Barry Alvarez's first two years, 1991 and 1992. The 22-year bowl streak is dead too. Leipold misplaced a defense. Fickell misplaced the whole identity.

That one drops on Friday, July 10.