photo by: Kahner Sampson/Special to the Journal-World

Kansas linebacker Joseph Sipp Jr. takes part in spring practice on Thursday, March 6, 2025, in Lawrence.

Joseph Sipp Jr. still would have come to Kansas even if he hadn’t heard about the school from JB Brown.

“Just coming here, stepping on ground, stepping on campus when I took my visit, it just felt like home from the get-go,” Sipp said on Saturday.

There’s no denying, though, that the chance to learn about the merits of KU from his ex-roommate — Sipp and Brown played together as linebackers at Bowling Green in 2022 — helped sway him to join the Jayhawks.

“JB was a big factor in the process for that,” Sipp said.

When Sipp entered the transfer portal, Brown had just concluded a successful two-year stint as the Jayhawks’ primary weak-side linebacker. In 2024, Brown started every game for KU with a career-high 74 tackles and five sacks, earning an all-conference honorable mention for his efforts.

With Sipp — himself a first-team all-league linebacker for the Falcons — looking for a new home and texting Brown for input, Brown had a chance to help keep the pipeline from Bowling Green to Lawrence going by giving KU a strong recommendation.

“He told me coach (Chris) Simpson was a great guy, a great coach, someone I could learn off and someone I could build my game from, knowing I got all the (speed and physicality) and he could just help me with little techniques and minor things that I need to work on in my game,” Sipp recalled. “So that was a big factor in that, and also just telling me that the culture is nice and the stadium, and everything’s getting built.

“I was just like, ‘I want to be a part of that.'”

Sipp is more specifically part of a brand-new linebacker group that also features fellow transfers Bangally Kamara from South Carolina on the weak side and Trey Lathan from West Virginia in the middle, along with returnees Logan Brantley, Jayson Gilliom and Jon Jon Kamara.

“Some of these guys just have some natural feel, some natural instincts, and he’s one of those for sure,” said Simpson, Sipp’s position coach. “He’s able to just kind of get himself in position. Continuing to learn — all three of those transfers are, as well as the incoming freshmen (Malachi Curvey and walk-on Wesley Edison).”

Sipp, a 6-foot linebacker from Hillsborough, Florida, doesn’t have the power-conference pedigree of some of his new teammates, and he’s had to adjust to new amenities like KU’s nutrition staff and the snacks the team has available in the facility.

“I’m starting to get used to them here now, so I kind of forget what I didn’t have,” he said.

He’s made a lasting impression on his teammates and coaches, though, coming off a season in which he racked up 79 tackles with 11.5 for loss, including seven sacks, and did so against top competition: He led BGSU with eight tackles against Penn State and had five with a sack against Texas A&M.

“Joe Sipp may not always pass the eyeball test with people, but he’s very instinctive and physical,” head coach Lance Leipold said.

Bangally Kamara put it simply: “He’s a hitter.”

Sipp has appreciated his teammates’ “openness to teach and learn without even knowing me” in his early days on campus. On one early occasion, he remembered, he made a blunder by being insufficiently prepared for a meeting.

“Now that I know that I won’t do it again, but the first meeting I didn’t have a pen,” he said, “and (one of the players was) like, ‘Hey Sipp, get a pen,’ he gave me a pen. Just little things like that.”

If he ever needs more help settling in at KU, he has a former teammate a text message away.