photo by: Carter Gaskins/Special to the Journal-World

Kansas defensive end Dean Miller during practice on Saturday, March 30, 2024, in Lawrence.

When the Kansas football team was going through spring practice, Dean Miller’s weight-gain plan included a requirement of consuming no fewer than 5,000 calories per day.

“Now in fall camp,” he said recently, “I literally just eat ’til I can’t eat no more.”

Miller may have the most critical strength and nutrition program of any player on the Jayhawks’ roster. The onetime JUCO transfer, who has toiled on special teams throughout his first two years in Lawrence, has managed to reach 235 pounds in advance of the season, putting himself in position to deploy his athleticism and agility as a probable starter at weak-side defensive end this fall.

“I really like what Dean Miller’s done,” head coach Lance Leipold said. “A guy that’s kind of put it together a little bit more. We use the GPS units and his numbers are usually at the top, between acceleration, deacceleration, yardage, all that work. The kid’s playing hard and he’s getting better.”

Miller’s new weight is a step up from 227 in the spring, which itself was a jump from, well, any other point in his collegiate career. Asked on Thursday about Miller being around 180 pounds coming out of high school, strength coach Matt Gildersleeve cracked that it might even have been the case “coming out of last season.”

Coaches have repeatedly stressed that there was never any question about Miller’s ability to play when the Jayhawks brought him over from College of the Canyons.

“It was always just about putting on the weight to get him on the field, and he’s there right now,” position coach Taiwo Onatolu said, adding that it was particularly significant for Miller as a “high-motor guy” who burns a lot of calories as “he runs like crazy at practice.” (He can run at speeds of more than 21 mph.) Miller himself said he loses five to nine pounds of sweat during a day at practice.

The question, one Gildersleeve recently posed to Miller, becomes why it took so long for him to embrace the nutrition program — which Gildersleeve said he did over the last seven months. The response he got was “There’s nothing you guys could have done, I just had to make a decision.”

Gildersleeve pinpointed as a particular inflection point a challenging meeting between Leipold and Miller in which the head coach made it perfectly clear what his defensive end would need to do.

“I respect a ton of things about Coach Leipold, but Coach Leipold is brutally honest with any player and he will tell them exactly how it is,” Gildersleeve said. “As an athlete in our program, you are never going to get the runaround from our head football coach.”

So, as Gildersleeve put it, Miller made the decision to buy in fully “pretty much when he walked out of the doors of that meeting.”

“You guys probably all gain three pounds just from walking past the food station, let alone stopping at it, OK?” Gildersleeve told reporters. “The resources were there the whole time, Dean just decided to buy in with it harder.”

That buy-in manifests itself on a daily basis as the following dietary routine.

Miller’s breakfast — oatmeal, yogurt, smoothie — begins his day. Later on, he has lunch, which he follows with a 1,000-calorie peanut butter shake prepared by nutritionist Katie O’Connor, “to chug down after I get a big meal in, make sure I’m real full.”

“Leading up into dinner,” he said, “I got some snacks coming up, whether it be another little protein shake here, granola bar, just kind of like some snacks to hold me over that couple hours in between lunch and dinner.”

Dinner takes place at the team facility, followed by a night-time walkthrough.

“And then when I go home, eat another big meal, chug down another shake,” he said.

Miller said that the voracious routine has at this point become force of habit.

“I don’t really have to think about and remind myself, ‘I got to be eating right now.'” he said. “Also, now, I feel like the weight that I have put on is kind of sticking on me a little better.”

If his on-field play can be as effortful as his off-field nutritional plan, Miller has a chance to follow in the footsteps of players like Lonnie Phelps and Austin Booker and become KU’s next breakout pass rusher.