photo by: AP Photo/Barry Reeger

Penn State offensive coordinator Andy Kotelnicki watches warmup before an NCAA college football game between Penn State and Ohio State, Saturday, Nov. 2, 2024, in State College, Pa.

The general consensus around the Kansas football program seems to be that working alongside Andy Kotelnicki isn’t all that different the second time around.

“You jump right back into it,” passing game coordinator Jim Zebrowski said.

But there are some changes, to be sure. For one, head coach Lance Leipold said KU has reshaped some of its offensive terminology, in line with changes Kotelnicki might have made during his two-year sojourn at Penn State. Also, Kotelnicki and co-offensive coordinator Matt Lubick are back working together — and working out together — in person, after Lubick was contributing remotely from Colorado while battling leukemia in 2023, Kotelnicki’s last season as the offensive coordinator for the Jayhawks.

Most notable, though, might be a new feather in Kotelnicki’s cap: He coached Tyler Warren.

Kotelnicki was the offensive coordinator at Penn State the year Warren caught 104 passes for 1,233 yards and eight touchdowns, ran for four touchdowns, threw for one more for good measure, won the Mackey Award for the nation’s top tight end and ended the season as a first-round pick in the NFL Draft.

Kotelnicki had a reputation for deploying tight ends in creative ways when he was at KU, but none of those players shattered school and conference records with the proficiency of Warren (whose team, of course, made it to the national title game).

“He was a tight end that was a Heisman Trophy candidate and had stats that were off the charts, and part of it was he’s a really good football player, but part of it was the play design and the uniqueness and creativity of moving him around, and so we’re trying to do that,” Lubick said. “Now I’m not saying we have Tyler Warren on our football team right now. Who knows, we might — we’re trying to get guys like that. But we have some pretty good football players, and I think they’re excited about the creativity and the different things that we can do with them.”

They certainly seem to be, because both Carson Bruhn, a returning player, and Carter Moses, a transfer from Albany, brought up Kotelnicki’s success with Warren unprompted when meeting with the media on Tuesday.

Kotelnicki had recruited Bruhn out of high school (he recently reminisced about watching Bruhn in his school’s production of “Grease”) but left to join the Nittany Lions shortly before Bruhn’s arrival on campus. Bruhn found that “devastating” at the time. His return this winter, however, was a delight, in no small part due to what he demonstrated in Happy Valley.

“Tyler Warren at Penn State’s a great example of how he can use larger tight ends,” Bruhn said, “both in the pass game and run game too.”

Bruhn, by the way, is the same height and within two pounds of what Warren measured during his senior year at Penn State. He will look to stake his claim for increased playing time in 2026 after a foot injury cut short his promising redshirt freshman campaign.

For Moses, already a veteran redshirt senior with 27 catches for 338 yards and three touchdowns last season at Albany, both what Kotelnicki had done at Penn State and his previous body of work at KU had intrigued him.

“Seeing that through the recruiting process was definitely a big help,” Moses said.

He and fellow transfer Jailen Butler, from Old Dominion, will likely not be the last tight ends to receive a similar pitch — one that invokes Warren as an exemplar. But Lubick and Kotelnicki are now focused on getting results out of the robust group currently in their care: Bruhn, Butler, Moses, Leyton Cure and a handful of young players and walk-ons.

“We’re trying to live in the present,” Lubick said. “We’re going to work on daily improvement with the guys we got, and we think we got a really good group.”