photo by: Kansas Athletics

Kansas' Austin Alexander, left, and Leroy Harris III tackle UCF's Chris Domercant on Saturday, Oct. 4, 2025, in Orlando, Fla.

Orlando, Fla. — Kansas linebacker Trey Lathan had no doubt that he had stopped UCF quarterback Cam Fancher on fourth-and-goal in the late stages of KU’s 27-20 victory.

“For sure, yeah,” Lathan said. “I knew he was short.”

The officials at the Bounce House on Saturday night weren’t quite as certain — they reviewed the play to confirm that Lathan had wrestled Fancher down without the ball crossing the plane — but the call stood: a pivotal goal-line stand, including three straight plays from just outside the goal line, for a team that could hardly get a stop at any point on the field in its home loss to Cincinnati just a week earlier.

“I feel like last week wasn’t really a good showing of how they can finish games,” running back Leshon Williams said, “and I feel like God gave them the opportunity today just to show the world that they can.”

And to think that at the two-minute timeout, they had been facing second-and-goal at the 1-yard line, nursing a seven-point lead.

“When you get in that position, minds start running, hearts start beating fast,” Lathan said. “We just got to stay focused.”

“They rallied around, they weren’t defeated,” head coach Lance Leipold added of KU’s sideline demeanor. “‘Let’s keep them out.’ All the kind of things that you expect guys to say. We talked about making sure that we saved ourselves time if they did score, that we would give ourselves plenty of time to drive and try to kick a field goal to win it or something, or see where it takes us.”

But in fact, UCF got nothing from Fancher on a sneak, nothing from running back Myles Montgomery on a handoff and nothing one more time from Fancher on the final play, a delayed quarterback power run that led him to a gap filled quite adeptly by the Florida-native linebacker Lathan, cornerback Austin Alexander and safety Jalen Dye.

Dye said the mentality was “get him down by any means necessary.”

“I saw a guy flash right by me,” Lathan said — that would presumably be UCF tight end Thomas Wadsworth, who got a hand on him but didn’t manage much of a block — “and then I saw (Fancher) had the ball, and I just tried to get over the block fast as I could, just so I could stop him.”

Thanks to Lathan, they got off the field with less than two minutes to go, after three timeouts called by Leipold.

And then they had to do it all again. The KU offense couldn’t get a first down as it tried to plow its way forward from its own end zone, so the Jayhawks punted right back with barely any time off the clock. Fancher and the Knights reclaimed possession at 1:27.

“Here we are calling the timeouts (on the first drive) and then you get the stop, and you worry, ‘I probably should have let one of those go, right?'” Leipold said. “Then we’d have about a minute to go or something.”

Instead, Fancher had enough time to get the Knights deep into KU territory with a pass to Carl Jenkins Jr., but then the Jayhawks forced a second turnover on downs: four straight incompletions from KU’s 22-yard line, headlined by a pass breakup by Alexander, to seal the result once and for all.

It was a game that saw KU’s defense grow over the course of 60 minutes of game time to gradually lock down a UCF rushing attack that had torched it in the early stages. As Leipold put it, there was plenty of “on-the-job training” for KU’s young secondary.

That training was a clear success, as it resulted in a hard-fought comeback victory.

“It just puts a lot more excitement, because we got a tough game ahead of us on the road, playing against a ranked opponent,” Lathan said. “It instills some confidence in us, and it helps us going into this week, with a chip on our shoulder a little bit.”

Indeed, next up is Texas Tech, which will surely be a top-10 team by the time KU makes the trip to Jones AT&T Stadium on Saturday night. Leipold cautioned his team that confidence will only go so far.

“I told them, ‘It’s great to have confidence, but you got to come back to work on Monday hungry for a big challenge,'” he said.