Kansas head coach Lance Leipold looks on as his team plays against Arizona State during the first half of an NCAA college football game Saturday, Oct. 5, 2024, in Tempe, Ariz. (AP Photo/Darryl Webb)

Tempe, Ariz. — Ten months ago, Kansas defensive end DJ Warner played his final football game with Desert Edge High School at Mountain America Stadium.

Desert Edge, which had 16 players ejected due to a fight late in the first half and had come back from four touchdowns behind, had put the ball in his hands for a game-winning two-point conversion. Warner scored. Then the Scorpions got called for holding, missed the ensuing second attempt and lost the state title to Higley.

“It ended in a controversial way,” Warner said on Wednesday. “So I’m excited to go back, but I’ve been trying to focus on worrying about today, worrying about the day ahead of me.”

By Saturday, though, Warner got to play back in his home state, this time as a Jayhawk in a college football game, in front of what he estimated as more than 30 family members.

The fact that he got the chance to visit the Valley of the Sun at all was a fortuitous consequence of conference realignment.

“It’s surreal because I think it couldn’t have worked out better,” he said.

Indeed, the KU football team may never have played against Arizona State prior to Saturday, and in fact the Jayhawks hadn’t played a regular-season game in the state of Arizona at all, but the Phoenix area has become quite familiar for KU.

Most notably, the Jayhawks visited Phoenix to play the Guaranteed Rate Bowl at Chase Field, home of MLB’s Arizona Diamondbacks, on Dec. 26.

KU’s coaches have also spent a lot of time in the area in recent years, however. Former defensive backs coach Jordan Peterson, who is now at Texas A&M, received credit for helping create a pipeline by which the Jayhawks recruited three players in the class of 2024 from Desert Edge High School in Goodyear, Arizona, just west of Phoenix: cornerback Aundre Gibson, linebacker Jon Jon Kamara and, of course, Warner. KU also signed offensive lineman Carter Lavrusky from Horizon High School in Scottsdale.

“I’d say any time any player can go back to his home state and play in front of people, I think it’d be pretty exciting,” head coach Lance Leipold said.

Warner was, by most metrics, the Jayhawks’ highest-ranked recruit of the modern era and has already contributed to KU this season as its first weak-side defensive end off the bench. Through five games, he had played 76 snaps, half as a pass rusher. By clearing the four-game threshold he ensured he will not redshirt during the 2024 season, making him one of just two Jayhawk freshmen to do so this year alongside cornerback Jalen Todd.

“For any young guy it’s locking into the details,” defensive coordinator Brian Borland said in reference to Warner. “It’s not just Friday night against some team where you can just go out there and I can do whatever I want, I’m going to be successful.”

Added Leipold: “I think he played his best game to date last week (against TCU) and hopefully (as) he continues to progress, he’s going to keep showing up more and more.”

The recruiting efforts have continued following Peterson’s departure. Leipold suggested during the week that the coaching staff would try to make it out to some local high school games on Friday night ahead of Saturday’s early-evening kickoff.

Heat and turnout

It was an announced 107 degrees at kickoff on Saturday, the sort of environment to which ASU is well accustomed and KU not quite as much.

Leipold pointed out that the Jayhawks dealt with intense heat and humidity when they made the trip to Austin, Texas, for their fifth game of the 2023 season.

“I think we’ve been pretty intentional all along about hydration and those things, our strength staff, nutrition staff emphasize it,” Leipold said. “It’s a little different — it’s supposed to be a dry heat, right, whatever that means.”

He further noted that the conditions would require KU to rotate players extensively, and the Jayhawks followed through on that during Saturday’s game.

KU did go to some extra effort to simulate the desert conditions. On Wednesday, the Jayhawks practiced in their indoor facility and cranked up the heat, guard Michael Ford Jr. said.

“I think they said it got to about 100 and something degrees, so yeah, it was hot, but as a team, I think we grinded through,” he said.

Despite the weather on Saturday, ASU managed to sell out, as it announced an hour before kickoff on Saturday.

Coaching crossover

ASU may be new to the Big 12, but as small as the coaching world is, its staff inevitably shares some connections with KU’s, and vice versa.

Leipold said he has known ASU defensive coordinator Brian Ward for a long time. The two haven’t overlapped much, but Leipold’s first year coaching at Buffalo, 2015, was also Ward’s lone year as defensive coordinator at Bowling Green; the Falcons came out on top that year, and then Ward followed Dino Babers to Syracuse the following season. As it happens, Ward played and coached in multiple stints at McPherson College in Kansas.

KU offensive coordinator Jeff Grimes has coached at 11 different FBS schools, and one of them happens to be ASU, where he was the run game coordinator and offensive line coach under Dirk Koetter from 2001 to 2003.

ASU included in its weekly game notes a slew of intricate and increasingly esoteric connections between the coaching staffs. Among them were wide receivers coach Terrance Samuel’s work with ASU linebackers coach A.J. Cooper (at North Dakota State) and Samuel’s job under now-ASU offensive coordinator Marcus Arroyo (at UNLV).

A few players also spent time at the same schools, including cornerbacks Damarius McGhee of KU and Laterrance Welch of ASU, who were once teammates at LSU.