photo by: Henry Greenstein/Journal-World

Kansas co-offensive coordinator and tight ends coach Matt Lubick speaks to reporters at the team's practice facility on Thursday, Feb. 20, 2025.

Kansas coach Lance Leipold was surprised when offensive coordinator Jeff Grimes left for Wisconsin, but it didn’t take him long to figure out how he wanted to reshape his offensive staff.

After he elevated Jim Zebrowski from co-offensive coordinator to OC, it was clear to Leipold that Matt Lubick was the next piece he needed.

“I made one phone call,” Leipold said on Thursday. “I made one phone call when Jeff resigned, once we promoted Jim. Matt was the No. 1 target, and he was anxious to return to Lawrence, and I’m excited about that.”

So anxious, in fact, that “I don’t know if I fully even got the question out if he was in or not and he said yes,” Leipold said, “so it was pretty exciting.”

In 2023, his second season as an analyst in his previous stint under Leipold, Lubick had fought leukemia while working remotely from Colorado, helping the Jayhawks with game plans. The following spring, he was in remission and left to serve as offensive coordinator at Nevada.

Now he’s back at KU as co-offensive coordinator and tight ends coach, revisiting an offense on which he left plenty of fingerprints over the years.

“This isn’t taking away from any past coach, coordinator or anything that we’ve had here before,” Leipold said, “but I thought in the ’22 and ’23 seasons, Matt Lubick’s contributions to our program, to our offense and ideas and thoughts, little tweaks that we were able to do, but really his advanced work early in the week, was really time-saving for us.”

Even before he first joined KU, Lubick was laying the groundwork for what became a key portion of KU’s offense. During Lubick’s two years working at Nebraska as the offensive coordinator and wide receivers coach — he has coached at a dozen programs in a wide range of capacities — he studied the way other schools were using the option, including just down the road at Division II Nebraska-Kearney and a bit farther afield at Coastal Carolina.

His work in that realm brought him into contact with then-KU offensive coordinator Andy Kotelnicki.

“He said, ‘I like what you guys are doing with the option stuff, because it fits our skill set. We have an athletic quarterback and it’ll let us get the ball on the perimeter. Will you come out and talk to us for a couple days?'” Lubick recalled. “That’s how the whole thing started. That’s how I got involved with the program, was coming out and talking about various types of option we do and how we did it.”

Quarterback Jalon Daniels, the starter then as now, is “as good of a guy as you could possibly want to run those types of plays,” Lubick said. Lubick added that the option was “not that expensive,” for Nebraska or for Kansas, because it didn’t require redesigning an entire offense. Indeed, Kotelnicki and the Jayhawks incorporated it to great effect in the memorable opening weeks of the 2022 season, Lubick’s first as an analyst.

“From there it kind of grew into helping out with third downs or red zone or different pass concepts,” he said.

Later, Nevada was an excellent third-down and red-zone offense in Lubick’s one year leading the Wolf Pack, a key point in his nomination for the Broyles Award that goes to the nation’s top assistant coach.

Now he’s back at KU, a familiar destination in one sense but somewhat less familiar in that he now coaches the tight ends.

That’s the position group that opened up when Grimes left, and while Lubick has served in numerous capacities on both sides of the ball, he has never been specifically a tight ends coach.

“He’s an excellent, smart football coach,” Leipold said. “He’s coached defensive backs in his career, he knows the game, he’s grown up in it, he’s involved in it. Yeah, there’ll probably some slight adjustments with the tight end, in-line stuff, but I also am very confident that in the adjustment of rules, (so) that analysts and others can coach, we’ll have a lot of people that will be able to be involved and help there, and he’s embraced the opportunity to coach that position.”

Lubick praised the particular group of players he’s inherited as “highly motivated,” citing their overall grade-point average of 3.8. The current room of tight ends features DeShawn Hanika, a former Iowa State transfer coming off an injury who Leipold said is emerging as a leader, and Arizona transfer Keyan Burnett, along with returnees Leyton Cure, Jaden Hamm and Carson Bruhn.

Lubick said that he’s “had a tendency to gravitate toward the passing game” in the past but can now become more involved with the rushing attack.

“It’s a really neat position because we depend a lot on them,” Lubick said of the tight ends. “We ask a lot of them. They have to know the whole run game and they have to know the whole passing game and be point-of-attacks in both, which is exciting for me.”