Lance Leipold takes the stage at Big 12 Media Days
Kansas head coach Lance Leipold did several interviews during the Big 12 Media Days. Here is a look at his main interview with reporters.
Leipold talked about his team’s success late in the season, Jalon Daniel’s leadership qualities and much more. Here are some comments from Leipold and and his full interview from media days.
Leipold comments at Big 12 Media Days
How is Jalon Daniels being able to empower others around him to step up and to lead with him as well:
Jalon is healthy. He’s excited. You know the thing I love about Jalon Daniels is he’s the same person he was four years ago. He’s humble. He’s hardworking. You know it’s been an interesting road for Jalon and the Jayhawks. When we see Jalon playing his best, I think there’s not many better, that’s for sure.
At the same time, as he’s had to persevere through some injuries and doing the things, he has stayed the same person. He doesn’t make excuses. He doesn’t know he’s been positive. He walks around with the same smile on his face. And he’s never once, like I said, made an excuse or deflected anything that hasn’t gone his way. And that alone is something that I know our locker room greatly respects about him and his energy and his positivity is very, very contagious.
If you could bottle up one or a few things from that mid-November run what would it be:
Last year, before that November run is the tough start to the season and we just didn’t play our best when our best was needed. We didn’t close out football games. We had opportunities to and at the same time though as we talk about our daily process within our program, we didn’t waver on that. We didn’t deflect and we didn’t blame.
We worked to continue to work hard and again our locker room did a great job. Our leaders did a great job of sticking together and working hard and I think we found out that once we were able to turn the corner and flip the switch so to speak, our confidence grew and we became the team that we thought we could have been all the way.
You start in week zero, was it important you played that early:
The week zero game was something that was on the schedule before my arrival. Again, the opportunity. When you play a team that’s playing at Hawaii, you get a chance to get that week zero game. We wanted to keep it once we saw it. It’s timing up very well with the new stadium. As you know, there’s a limited amount of games on in week zero. We feel it’ll be a great time and exposure for our program and our new stadium. The Friday game again is another opportunity to kind of play and as we go into the third game of the year then then we have a chance for an extra day of prep. So we feel that we played a lot of our FCS opponents on a weeknight and we felt it would be good to stay in that format. So that’s what we went with.
