photo by: Nick Krug

Head coach David Beaty and his staff have spent recent months working to fill their squad with walk-ons.

photo by: Nick Krug

Head coach David Beaty and his staff have spent recent months working to fill their squad with walk-ons.

The Kansas football team and first-year head coach David Beaty are less than two weeks away from the start of a new season and a new era. But when one considers the long road ahead for the first-time head coach and the program in general, it’s hard to forget KU got to this point with the help of former head coach Charlie Weis.

ESPN’s Jake Trotter made that abundantly clear in a piece examining the state of KU football, referring to Weis’s two-plus seasons at KU — when the Jayhawks went 6-22 — as “utterly ruinous.”

photo by: Nick Krug

Kansas head coach Charlie Weis lays into a game official for what he believes was a missed call during the second quarter on Saturday, Sept. 27, 2014 at Memorial Stadium.

Trotter points out KU would have been much better off hiring Gus Malzahn, then offensive coordinator at Auburn, instead of Weis.

“For Kansas, the Malzahn match made
too much sense,” Trotter writes. “But
in a defining decision, the Jayhawks
changed course in the final moments
and opted to go with the biggest name
they could get.”

Malzahn, of course, went on to coach at Arkansas State for one season before returning to Auburn as head coach. The Tigers went 12-2 his first year and 8-5 in 2014. Who knows how he would have fared in Lawrence. But you get the feeling the guy could (eventually) win anywhere.

Maybe in a few years, once Beaty and his staff have time to recruit and train multiple batches of recruiting classes, he can win at Kansas, too — just like his former boss, Mark Mangino.

KU football coach Mark Mangino celebrates after the Jayhawks won the Orange Bowl on Jan. 3. Mangino went 50-48 from 2002-2009.

For the time being, the upbeat Beaty and his energy-filled assistants will have to begin a slow, steady rebuilding project this fall. A one- or two-win season seems likely to be in play at KU. As ESPN points out, since 2000, 20 major-conference teams have finished with one victory or fewer — including Weis’s 2012 Jayhawks. Trotter says Beaty has a “herculean task to keep the 2015 Jayhawks from joining that ignominious club.”

As you know by now, the lack of marquee returning starters and a deficiency in scholarship players are what make KU’s current situation so daunting.

And those are the reason’s Weis’s name will continue to come up as Beaty’s Jayhawks compete this season.