Daniels, Foster, Finkley named captains

photo by: Missy Minear/Kansas Athletics

Kansas center Bryce Foster prepares to block during spring practice on Saturday, April 5, 2025, in Lawrence.

Head coach Lance Leipold announced the Kansas football team’s captains for the 2025 season following the conclusion of Monday’s opening game-week practice.

Center Bryce Foster, one of the three players chosen, found himself tearing up as the Jayhawks went through their post-practice prayer.

“I kind of caught myself,” Foster said. “I don’t know, it gave me goosebumps, gets me excited, and I’m just excited to represent this team the way it should be represented.”

Foster, a fifth-year senior in his second year with the Jayhawks, joins quarterback Jalon Daniels, a sixth-year senior who has spent his entire career in Lawrence, and defensive end Justice Finkley, a senior transfer who made a strong impression after joining KU from Texas for the spring semester.

“It means a lot just knowing that my teammates kind of hold me in that light and see me that way,” Finkley said.

The three will be joined by at least one rotational captain on a weekly basis, Leipold told reporters on Monday.

“I think it’s great to just highlight somebody that’s also displaying those qualities of a captain, that’s displaying those qualities of a great leader,” Finkley said. “… There’s other guys doing it too, and there’s other guys working just as hard at it.”

Daniels is a longtime fixture of the KU program and of its leadership group as well, as he now enters his fourth consecutive season as a captain.

The native of Lawndale, Calif., played his first full year of action in 2024 after previously dealing with injuries, but took about half the season to reclaim the top-tier form he had displayed during the rest of his career. He has said his goal is to combine availability and high-quality play for what will be his final year of college football.

“I’m enjoying everything, enjoying every single day for what it is because I don’t have another year of eligibility that I can just be able to think about next year,” Daniels said on Monday.

Foster joined KU during the summer of 2024 as a transfer from Texas A&M and was one of the Jayhawks’ best players last season, as well as arguably the top center in the Big 12 Conference. He said that he regained — or gained for the first time — a certain level of confidence in his play last season that he didn’t have before: “My first couple years of college football, whenever I was playing, I don’t really think I was playing with a lot of confidence. I think I was just playing football.”

“It was kind of surreal whenever they told us after practice today,” Foster said of the captaincy. “Just kind of like my story, kind of where I came from, things that I’ve had troubles with, especially at my last school, and being able to turn myself around into what I’ve become now is kind of crazy, kind of surreal.”

Offensive coordinator Jim Zebrowski said Foster’s off-field work ethic and his on-field guidance combine to make him a strong choice.

“He really does a great job of leading the offensive line, just taking charge of those guys,” Zebrowski said. “I think that’s what the guys see.”

Finkley, who is from Trussville, Ala., played his first three seasons with the Longhorns. It didn’t take long for him to stake his claim to a starting role at strong-side defensive end for KU, but earning the respect of his teammates required him to step outside of his comfort zone and grow from being a lead-by-example type to the sort who vocally exhorts the defense to give its best effort on a daily basis.

“First coming in here in January, I thought I would never be able to display the actual qualities of a leader,” Finkley said. “In a previous interview, I said that I was able to focus on being more of a vocal leader instead of being an example. Just seeing my progress in making those leaps and bounds, like I said, of being a leader, it paid off, so it means a lot.”

That all prompted Monday’s announcement, which resulted in a celebratory moment for the newly selected captains. Finkley said he received “a lot of congrats, a lot of rubs on the head.” Foster said some of his teammates put a new spin on his old and largely phased-out nickname, “The Mountain,” calling him “Mount Cap.”

“And I guess that may stick,” he said.