Kansas linebacker Jon Jon Kamara (8) celebrates an interception by the Jayhawks during the second quarter on Saturday, Aug. 23, 2025 at David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium. Photo by Nick Krug

Kansas didn’t encounter a lot of resistance in its 46-7 victory over Wagner last Friday, but one of the “disappointments of the game,” as head coach Lance Leipold put it, arrived late in the first quarter.

Redshirt freshman linebacker Jon Jon Kamara, making his first career start at weak-side linebacker with teammates Jayson Gilliom and Bangally Kamara recently injured, got ejected for targeting when he ran in to make a tackle on Wagner’s Zayden Davis.

The result was that the young Kamara, who entered with just 19 defensive snaps to his name entering Friday, was only able to play 10 more in what could potentially have been a significant learning opportunity.

Instead, he’s going to have to do a lot of learning on the fly. Among other growing responsibilities, he is listed as KU’s starter next to Trey Lathan on the Week 2 depth chart ahead of Saturday’s rivalry battle with Missouri.

“He needs to be a key special-teams player for us,” Leipold said on Monday. “He needs to be ready to play his most football in his career on Saturday and I know he’ll prepare to do so.”

The longstanding narrative with Kamara since he entered the program in the fall of 2024 has been that he is one of KU’s best overall athletes — if not the single best — but, now listed at 6-foot-4 and 230 pounds, he has had to grow into playing linebacker after serving as a defensive back for much of his high school career in Arizona.

“He continues to progress, and things that maybe weren’t completely natural to him, he’s worked extremely hard so it has been,” Leipold said.

As a result, he’s improved as much as any player in the program, “and he’s just started to scratch the surface of how good he could be,” the head coach added.

“He’s grown over the past week, let alone the past year,” safety Taylor Davis said on Tuesday.

Kamara’s development accelerated to the point that he put himself in position to play as a redshirt freshman, after receiving snaps on special teams during his first year in the program. He had been listed as the primary backup to Bangally Kamara for the first two weeks of the season before the veteran South Carolina transfer suffered a non-contact injury in practice on Aug. 27. (On3 has reported he will be out “a few weeks” but that the injury “was not as bad as initially feared.”)

In the meantime, it will be Jon Jon Kamara receiving the first-team responsibilities.

“The great thing about our defense is that we got a lot of different ways to adjust and do a lot of different things with some guys, but yet keeping it simple,” defensive coordinator D.K. McDonald said. “… Naturally when you lose somebody like Bangally it does make a difference, but like I said it’s good we got the depth and guys able to stand up and help us out and help us win a football game and that’s the most important thing.”

McDonald lamented the ejection that cut short Kamara’s starting debut. He said the penalty can serve as a good teaching point for KU’s linebackers, but that he doesn’t want them to lose any speed or physicality by playing more cautiously.

“His aiming point was actually a good aiming point, but if the running back ducks down then all of a sudden it’s a penalty,” McDonald said. “That’s a tough rule in college football, something I hope they look at in the future.”

He said he’s fine with a 15-yard penalty but doesn’t think targeting should result in an automatic ejection.

“If you get two of them, then yeah, probably kick a guy out, but I think that’s a very high penalty for a bang-bang mistake that you make,” he added.

The Jayhawks will need Kamara on the field as much as possible against Missouri and its potent offense. Redshirt sophomore Logan Brantley is his listed backup for this week, after playing a defense-leading 36 snaps against Wagner. Lathan and walk-on Ezra Vedral are the top choices at middle linebacker, with Gilliom still listed on the depth chart despite not having played in either of KU’s first two games.