photo by: Kansas Athletics

Kansas quarterback Jalon Daniels throws the ball against West Virginia on Saturday, Sept. 21, 2024, in Morgantown, W.Va.

Morgantown, W.Va. — The Kansas football team’s season has gotten off to an unexpectedly poor 1-3 start, culminating in Saturday’s conference-opening loss at West Virginia.

As the Jayhawks’ vaunted class of seniors looks to keep the team together and get the year back on track, though, many of them can take solace in the fact that they’ve endured much worse — at a time when they played for a vastly worse football team.

“We just sucked when I was first here,” said wide receiver Luke Grimm, who arrived in Lawrence in 2020. “I’m not worried about losing the game, and wondering if we’re going to come back from it. So I know that the seniors and the upperclassmen of this program, we came from way worse than what we are right now, so we’re not worried at all.”

Added quarterback Jalon Daniels, Grimm’s classmate: “He kind of hit the needle right on the head. We’ve been 0-9 before. So right now we’re 1-3. That’s one Big 12 game down, we still have eight more to go, so we’re just going to keep going, have that chip on our shoulders, and keep on coming out every single week to be able to play Kansas’ brand of football.”

Head coach Lance Leipold noted, though, that the responsibility of keeping the Jayhawks close as they try to rally goes beyond the usual veterans.

“Name a guy,” Leipold said, “I expect him to.”

That means the youngest members of the team — those who didn’t see the grim before-times — have a substantial role to play as well, whatever they may actually be charged with doing on game days.

“I expect Isaiah Marshall to be a leader and keep this group close and positive and work hard and do whatever he does,” Leipold said. “I expect Jalen Todd to do it. I expect every 30 seniors to do it. I expect every staff member to do it. I expect everybody who touches our program to stay positive and work as hard as we’ve ever worked before because we owe that to our people.”

Grimm noted, for example, that “there’s nobody bigger than scout guys on Thursdays, on Wednesdays, helping us make plays, helping us get looks.”

And even among the more experienced players, there may be chances for players behind the usual team leaders — for example, the captains Daniels, Grimm, running back Devin Neal and middle linebacker Cornell Wheeler — to step up.

One pivotal moment in the fourth quarter saw Wheeler, one of KU’s breakout defensive players this year and a more-than-adequate replacement for the departed Rich Miller, go down injured in the final minutes. He returned to action soon after, but the injury directly preceded the first of the Mountaineers’ pair of back-breaking touchdowns.

Cornerback Cobee Bryant, another senior, mentioned postgame that Wheeler impresses upon everyone the importance of handling their individual jobs, but “when Nell went down, everybody was just lackadaisical.”

“They ain’t know what was going on,” he said. “Somebody else like me got to step up. So Nell was telling me in the locker room I got to step up.”