photo by: Nick Krug

Kansas head coach Lance Leipold during the first quarter on Saturday, Sept. 28, 2024 at GEHA Field in Kansas City.

Kansas City, Mo. — When a reporter asked Lance Leipold about an officiating decision after Kansas lost at Illinois on Sept. 7, Leipold joked, “You’re going to try to get me fined, aren’t you? I’ll split the money with you if you let me say it. You’re in for five grand?”

He then went into a direct, but only lightly critical, explanation of the issue at hand (a picked-up flag for pass interference).

Three weeks and three losses later, Leipold took a far blunter approach when asked, as it happened, about three officiating decisions that went against the Jayhawks in KU’s home loss to TCU.

“They can fine me today,” he said. “I don’t really care.”

In the span of four minutes late in the third quarter on Saturday, the Jayhawks had a potential third-down pass for a conversion deep in their own territory deemed incomplete when Jamel Johnson ripped the ball away from Lawrence Arnold on the ground and the officials ruled Arnold had never secured the ball to begin with. On the next drive, KU then had a strip-sack by Dylan Wudke reversed to an incomplete pass. And finally, Leipold suggested TCU may have gotten away with a block in the back on JP Richardson’s 89-yard punt-return touchdown.

Leipold said these moments created frustration among the team as “everybody could see it on the replay,” and that he views it as part of his job to “voice (his) displeasure.”

“Did it drastically change the momentum of the game? Yes,” he said. “Did we still need to make plays and didn’t? Yes. OK, so I’m not going to take away from (TCU head coach Sonny Dykes’) team or their performance today, but absolutely that was a factor in this football game. If anybody was remotely paying attention, they would have to agree.”

Leipold suggested it was perhaps his “turn” to criticize the officiating after Dykes had gotten ejected the previous weekend at SMU. In that game, Dykes sustained two unsportsmanlike conduct penalties after apparently disputing a holding call that had wiped out a touchdown for TCU.

Leipold said representatives of the Big 12 Conference office were in attendance at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium, which he believed was likely because of the TCU game the prior week, “but yeah, we still got the same problem, and we know it on a weekly basis in this conference.”

In fact, Leipold had a gripe last week, too. He said he sent in a late hit for the conference’s consideration — an apparent reference to a play at West Virginia during which Marvin Grant got flagged for hitting a Mountaineer who looked to have been in bounds — and was told the penalty shouldn’t have been called.

“What do I do?” Leipold asked. “It doesn’t change the call, we don’t go back and replay things, so what do you do?”

In all, the remarks on Saturday were among Leipold’s sharpest public criticisms of officiating during his KU tenure, though he has expressed displeasure before. After a close loss to Oklahoma State last October, he characterized a play on which a Cowboy defender was not flagged for offsides as “baffling”; entering halftime at the Guaranteed Rate Bowl two months later, he made a comment in a radio interview about possibly wanting to “get a new crew” after a penalty-laden first half.

Even as the referees drew his ire again, though, he took accountability for the Jayhawks’ defeat when he described the mood in the locker room as “extremely down.”

“But why wouldn’t you be?” he said. “If you’re not, you’re not a competitor. You put all this time in, we talk about emphasis and things, and we’re not making it happen. And it starts with the head coach. I’m not getting it done for this program and for this fan base.”

Kansas fans react to what they believe was a missed call by officials during the third quarter on Saturday, Sept. 28, 2024 at GEHA Field in Kansas City.

photo by: AP Photo/Colin E. Braley

TCU receiver JP Richardson (7) returns a punt for a touchdown during the second half of an NCAA football game against Kansas on Saturday, Sept. 28, 2024, in Kansas City, Mo.