Kansas head coach Lance Leipold brings Kansas linebacker Rich Miller (30) in for a hug during the senior night introductions Saturday Nov. 18, 2023 at Memorial Stadium. Photo by Nick Krug

Asked to consider the long-term impact of his time with the Kansas football program, Rich Miller admits he thinks about certain things differently now that he’s become a father.

“It kind of changed my perspective on laying foundations,” Miller told the Journal-World in a recent interview.

Raising a baby is a new experience for him, but building something from the ground up is much more familiar.

As a linebacker for KU beginning in 2021, Miller played a key role in the program rebuild under Lance Leipold. He helped the Jayhawks generate the momentum that in turn fueled the creation of the revamped David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium.

As his teammate Mason Fairchild puts it, if they don’t demonstrate the program’s progress in concrete ways, like if they don’t make the 2022 Liberty Bowl or win the 2023 Guaranteed Rate Bowl, “Maybe that stadium doesn’t get built.”

Now working as a real estate agent in Florida, Miller acknowledges he would have loved to play in the new Booth, but it’s almost more meaningful to know how he and his teammates contributed to its creation.

“I know it was going to be electric, but it’s also been great to know that not just me but the teams I played on had a lot to do with it, and our success,” he said. “We laid the foundation — we laid bricks for future generations to come.”

Leipold arrived late in the spring of 2021, bringing along a handful of key transfers like Miller from his former school, Buffalo, who served as early leaders on his first few teams.

Hayden Hatcher predated all that. Originally from Council Bluffs, Iowa, and possessing just a lone Division II football offer out of high school, he played one year at junior college and then two years under Les Miles before Leipold’s arrival.

When he thinks about the new stadium, he thinks about all the fans he’s met who have been season ticket holders since before he was born. He also thinks about the ones who showed up for a particular game in 2019 in which KU hosted Baylor.

“I don’t even know, I don’t even want to guess what we were losing by, but people were still at the games,” he recalled. “There wasn’t a lot of people. I think of those people.”

The final score that day was 61-6.

“I always felt like we were in many ways a really gritty, resilient team even before Leipold got there,” said defensive tackle Sam Burt, who spent two years under David Beaty, two with Miles and two with Leipold. “You just had a lot of guys who were there kind of on their last chance and were trying to make it any way they can, we just didn’t really have the coaching to pull it off.”

After a memorable victory at Texas and stronger performances late in 2021, the results started to show in earnest in the 2022 season, when KU started unbeaten and hosted ESPN’s “College GameDay.”

“The people of Lawrence want, obviously, us to be good and they’re waiting for that team that they can rally behind, and we felt that in 2022,” Burt said. “And we did feel in many ways like the foundational team, baseline team, whatever you want to call it, because we got to a bowl but we didn’t win, but it was the first team to have some major successes along the way (compared to) what had been previously happening.”

By the first weeks of the 2022 campaign, the university had already begun soliciting design proposals for its football stadium and associated development at 11th and Mississippi streets, and then announced plans on Oct. 7, 2022. Then, on Aug. 15, 2023, KU unveiled in earnest its formal plans for the Gateway project in greater depth. Orange Bowl-era alumnus Chris Harris Jr. remarked at the time that he had been excited about pending renovations to the stadium back when he was a freshman, 16 years earlier; this time they would get done for real.

Chancellor Douglas Girod said the university was able to embark on the plans on “a more aggressive time schedule than we could have otherwise” because of the on-field success.

“It was in many ways surprising for me how quickly the athletic department was able to put forth a plan like this to get a stadium renovation and all the other stuff that they are doing for the football team,” Burt said.

The on-field performance delivered another boost of momentum in 2023 with a 9-4 season that featured the first bowl victory in 16 years.

“When you get to KU and a team that’s been struggling for 15-some years, everyone talks about being part of the change and all that stuff,” Fairchild said, “but to actually be a part of the team that really gets it turned around, you can’t even put into words how special that is and that’s something I’ll always look back on fondly.”

Hatcher said he thinks about his and his teammates’ legacy from that season in the context of what a similar record might have achieved at Iowa or Nebraska.

“If you’re a nine-win team there, you’re just another nine-win team,” he said, “but if you’re at Kansas and you win a bowl game, you just laid the foundation for a whole other series of winning seasons.”

Burt, a native Kansan from Abilene, still lives in Lawrence with his wife Reese, a KU rowing alumna. He said he has had the chance to see the stadium project in various stages of development.

“Now they have really good facilities that can help them be even better on the stage,” Burt said. “It’s really cool to see the little success that we had in 2022 kind of springboard them into (being) back on the national stage. That’s the expectation now, right?”

As any returning coach or player would tell you, the 2024 season in some ways fell short of expectations, particularly with so many of the same key contributors from the previous two years still in place.

Playing its home games at Children’s Mercy Park and GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium due to the ongoing construction at David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium, KU opened 1-5 with a series of close losses. The Jayhawks rallied with three straight wins over ranked foes to get themselves a game away from bowl eligibility, but couldn’t get over the hump against Baylor — a team that continues to vex them — in the final week of the season and finished 5-7.

Hatcher and teammate Austin Booker visited for the Houston game in 2024, a victory at Arrowhead that gave KU some life after its rough start. He said it was “one of the first times that I really felt the alumni spirit.”

“I felt like I was still a part of the team in the way, because I was down there (on the field),” he recalled, “but at the same time it was like I kind of get this feeling now of why people still wear the letterman jackets and still come back to the games.”

Miller sometimes wonders about what it would be like to play at the new stadium, but said that the legacy he left at KU means more than, as he put it, any tackle, his one career interception or any dropped interception.

“It makes me so proud,” he said. “When I was there (in March) I got a chance to catch up with a few of the guys, Logan Brantley in particular. With him being in the linebacker room with me — Cole Mondi, I see him doing his thing — it’s guys that I poured into every single day, and to see everything beginning to really come to fruition and see that those seeds that I planted actually have grown and they were actually listening to me, it means the most to me.”

Added Burt, who helped mentor players like Tommy Dunn Jr. and D.J. Withers: “It just makes you feel really encouraged that what you did in some ways had a lasting effect.”

They also have a more palpable reminder every time they come to Lawrence. Miller compared the revamped stadium to a purchase like a new toy, or a new car, or a new phone: “Everybody’s going to walk around with a different swagger.”

“Something brand new like that, everybody’s going to want to be there,” he said. “It’s going to be great for the economy, it’s going to be great for the community.”