It’s been a turbulent month for Kansas University’s athletic department with the firing of AD Al Bohl and the resignation of men’s basketball coach Roy Williams.

KU football coach Mark Mangino said Wednesday that the ouster of Bohl — the man who hired him Dec. 4, 2001 — had not impacted his team.

“Not at all,” Mangino said during the Big 12’s spring teleconference. “The departure of the athletics director has very little effect on the football program.”

Bohl was hired June 28, 2001, with a mandate to improve KU’s struggling football program and boost attendance at Memorial Stadium. Bohl fired coach Terry Allen with three games left in the 2001 season and hired Mangino a month later.

The arrival of Mangino — who had played key roles in rebuilding efforts at Kansas State and Oklahoma — helped boost season-ticket sales to their highest mark in more than 20 years.

Bohl, however, suffered from a rocky relationship with Williams and other KU staffers and was fired by KU Chancellor Robert Hemenway April 9.

Kansas will begin its search for Bohl’s replacement Monday, and Mangino was confident Hemenway and interim athletic director Drue Jennings would find the right man.

“The chancellor and I have been in constant conversation, and the chancellor has talked to me about the vision that I have for a football program when I first got here,” Mangino said. “And he is supportive and he wants us to win and be successful, and he is being active in our program in terms of helping us with raising of funds and developing some things from facilities and things that we need here. So it does not have an impact at all that (Bohl) is gone. And the new athletic director is going to be somebody that shares the same ideas as the chancellor about not just football but the entire department.”

• Bigger and better: Mangino said he was pleased with the efforts of first-year strength coach Chris Dawson, who is overseeing the Jayhawks’ offseason workouts in the new Anderson Family Strength and Conditioning Center.

“We feel like we’ve enhanced our team in the weight room and our out-of-season program,” Mangino said. “We’re a bigger, stronger, faster team than we were a year ago. And a lot of that has to do with our strength staff with the great job that they’ve done.”

• Improved attitude: The second offseason in Mangino’s program has been smoother for the coaching staff and the players, who now know the system and the demands.

“We haven’t spent any time coaching effort,” Mangino said. “Last spring we had to coach effort. We had to get our players to develop good work habits on the practice field and in the weight room, and it takes time when you have a new coach. But the kids that are with us right now have got a tremendous work ethic. It is one of the hardest-working ballclubs I’ve been around in terms of work ethic. They come everyday, ready to go, very few problems, no whining, no ‘this is too hard, this is too tough.’ We don’t hear those things that maybe we heard a year ago.

“Now last year’s club worked hard; this club here works much harder and smarter, too. They understand our systems, they know what we want, they know what the expectations are. So it’s a whole new level of attitude. I think our kids really understand how to work and how to make themselves better players and work to develop a good ball team.”

Kansas is scheduled to open the 2003 season Aug. 30 with a home game against Northwestern.