photo by: Kansas Athletics

DeAndre Harper

As long as DeAndre Harper has been playing competitive football, he’s been changing positions.

By the time Harper was a second-team all-state lineman at Omaha North High School in Nebraska, he had already moved outside once, from guard as an underclassman to tackle as an upperclassman. As a freshman at Northwest Missouri State, he remained at tackle — only to move to guard during a redshirt year at KU.

At a certain point, being able to play both, as he has during this year’s fall camp, has become an asset in and of itself — a quality that is making it increasingly likely he’ll play notable snaps for the Jayhawks in some form this season, as head coach Lance Leipold has said.

“If one of the five (starters) go down, we’re trying to find how does No. 6 get on the field,” offensive line coach Daryl Agpalsa said. “And with him, he’s moving in that direction, so the more flexibility … he has to play both guard and tackle, the better we’ll be.”

Harper came to KU as part of a class of several young transfers on the offensive line in the winter of 2025, all rising sophomores who had received fairly extensive playing time at lower levels during their freshman seasons. But compared to the other two, Harper — who had four starts in nine games at the Division II level — initially seemed like he might be more of a project.

He might have stayed at Northwest to begin with, but he found himself seeking greener pastures after a coaching change. Agpalsa had a longstanding connection with him dating back to when he was recruiting Harper to Northern Illinois.

“I had his number, I talked to him like every two weeks,” Harper told the Journal-World at KU football media day. “We had a pretty good relationship. He knew my head coach from high school, that’s what really hooked us up for real, Coach (Larry) Martin from Omaha North.”

Between the familiarity with his position coach, proximity to his hometown and an immediately favorable impression of the program — “When I came here on my visit, it was the first visit I took, I had other visits set up, but when I came here I knew it was the place for me” — it didn’t take long for Harper to commit to KU.

Harper is listed at 6-foot-6 and 320 pounds. He said that since his arrival in Lawrence, he has dropped his body fat percentage by about 7% with the help of KU’s nutrition staff.

“You know I’m a lineman, so I like to eat out here and there, but no, man, it’s just about discipline overall, eating the right stuff,” Harper said.

Combine that with plenty of offseason study of KU’s playbook, aided by Agpalsa and analyst Bill Queisert, and the results of all that off-field work have been borne out during fall camp.

“He’s been a pleasure, and he’s been a blessing, and he’s worked really, really hard to take the steps that he needed to (in order) to show,” Agpalsa said on Aug. 14, “because he is a talented young man, but in the last nine practices he’s continued to elevate even from the spring, and that’s great because it just creates a lot of competition within the room.”

It’s not so much that Harper has catapulted himself into the starting lineup; particularly with Leipold’s suggestion on Thursday that Amir Herring is back at guard with Kasen Carpenter at center, there’s really only one spot up for grabs, and it’s likely to go to the more experienced Tavake Tuikolovatu or Connor Stroh.

But if any given guard or tackle goes down from one of four potential spots, Harper might find himself as the top replacement. That’s a significant upward move from having appeared in just one game in 2025. As Leipold has put it, “When he gets on people, they have troubles getting off of him.”

“I feel like he’s a unique guy, really unique skill set, plays very physical,” Herring said. “He’s a big dude, so overall really, Dre’s taken all the right steps, really, to putting himself in a position to compete.”