photo by: Henry Greenstein/Journal-World

Kansas associate head coach Andy Kotelnicki speaks at his re-introductory press conference on Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2026.

When Andy Kotelnicki first got offered and accepted a job working for Lance Leipold back in 2013, he took less than 48 hours to make his way to Bismarck, North Dakota, where he had been working at the University of Mary, and then back to Whitewater, Wisconsin, to get started as Leipold’s offensive coordinator.

“And that’s the type of guy that he is,” Leipold said.

Leipold found himself reminiscing on that quick turnaround 13 years later when he hired Kotelnicki again, this time as Kansas’ associate head coach. Not long after Kotelnicki finished playing out the string as Penn State’s offensive coordinator in the Pinstripe Bowl, and once KU got his contractual details worked out, he was in the Anderson Family Football Complex on about 36 hours’ notice.

It just might have been a little more difficult for him to get there than when Kotelnicki left Leipold and the Jayhawks in December 2023.

“I come back and I stay over at The Oread — shoutout to The Oread,” Kotelnicki recalled on Wednesday. “And I’m there, and I didn’t have a car, and just got dropped off. I’m like, ‘OK, so I’m going to walk over to the building.’ I don’t know how to get to the building anymore because it’s all blocked off with all the construction.

“So I got to walk way around, and then I come into the building — which I can’t get into by the way, my code didn’t work anymore, it does now — but I come into the building and Billy Bonneau, who works in our recruiting office, starts showing me around, and I go, ‘This is a place that’s totally different.'”

Indeed, Kotelnicki finds the KU program in a dramatically different place than when he left two years ago, after having served as Leipold’s longtime offensive coordinator at Wisconsin-Whitewater, Buffalo and for three seasons with the Jayhawks. When he departed for Penn State, the Gateway project was just about to get underway. Now its first phase is eight months in the rearview mirror and its second phase has been formally unveiled. He came away incredibly impressed by the renovations to the stadium and the football complex, which he said have given KU “a top-10 facility in the country.”

On the other hand, the Jayhawks have stalled somewhat in terms of on-field results over the last two seasons with back-to-back 5-7 records, after Kotelnicki’s dynamic, unpredictable offensive scheme was a big reason why they went to consecutive bowl games in 2022 and 2023.

Now, in addition to a somewhat more expansive role as Leipold’s “right-hand man,” Kotelnicki will retake play-calling duties for the 2026 Jayhawks as they look to get headed in a positive direction.

“The thing that I’m excited about with Andy is that people want to come back to Kansas,” Leipold said. “We walked into a program where people couldn’t wait to get out of here faster enough … and also with that, we have changed the expectations in this program and now they’re harder to match, and we have to match them, and we will match them, and we understand that part of that success has changed how we go about things.”

In his first season with the Nittany Lions, Kotelnicki got the opportunity to display the creativity that made him such a widely renowned offensive coordinator at KU on more of a national stage. Penn State reached the College Football Playoff semifinals.

The outlook for that program changed dramatically amid a 3-3 start to 2025. James Franklin, the longtime head coach who brought Kotelnicki aboard, was summarily fired. The Nittany Lions finished 103rd in passing offense and 83rd in total offense compared to 66th and 26th, respectively, the prior year.

Leipold had stayed in contact with Kotelnicki over the years and made it clear to him that he’d be interested in finding a role for him to return to KU’s staff.

“Andy had a lot of opportunities and I’ll say it now, I’ll say it again, that Andy Kotelnicki will be a head coach someday, and probably someday soon, and he had opportunities to explore some of those again,” Leipold said.

Added Kotelnicki: “It’s a goal of mine. I’ve talked about that before. But I’ve learned that fit and timing and being in the right spot is the most important thing, not your title.”

Kotelnicki, for his part, said it was flattering to receive such widespread interest from various programs after the way things had gone at Penn State. He said he had to sit down and determine exactly what he wanted: a place where his family would be happy, where he would have a good quality of life, where he could make an impact, where he’d be surrounded by quality coaches and teachers and where he could win.

So he went back to Kansas.

One of his first concerns, he and Leipold both said, was retaining Jim Zebrowski. Kotelnicki’s longtime colleague had taken over as offensive coordinator for a season (after Jeff Grimes did so in 2024). Now, he’ll slide back into the position of passing game coordinator.

“I can’t thank Jim enough for his professionalism, how he’s gone about it,” Leipold said. “He understood it, and when I told Jim my decision on what I was doing, his first and really only question is: ‘Do I still get to coach the quarterbacks?’

“And that’s what I love about Jim, and I’ve said if you know Jim well enough, if Jim wasn’t coaching at the University of Kansas … Jim would go coach at the middle school and enjoy every second of it, as he does here, because he’s a football coach.”

Zebrowski, Kotelnicki and co-offensive coordinator/tight ends coach Matt Lubick will all be involved in the offense, as they were in 2022 and 2023. Kotelnicki said he has relished the chance to reunite with Zebrowski.

“It was like riding a bike,” Kotelnicki said. “I’m telling you, it was awesome. And (having a smooth transition) was a concern, because I think Jim brings out the best in me and I bring out the best in him, and I think we complement each other so well, in his style and my style and bouncing back and forth. He was one of the first people I connected with outside of Lance and the administration team here.”

Kotelnicki may have taken some time to learn the building’s layout, but there are familiar faces among the coaching staff, as well as on the roster. Even with plenty of turnover, the offense still includes players he coached in 2023 like quarterback Cole Ballard and receiver Keaton Kubecka, as well as others he recruited like tight end Carson Bruhn. (“I remember going to Carson’s high school musical to recruit him. True story, by the way. Went and saw ‘Grease,’ his mom was the producer. Or is that what they call it when you run it? Director — that’s what I said, director.”)

“That’s really been fun,” he added. “There’s guys that I had to reacquaint myself with when I got back, and it’s fun to see how much bigger and more mature a lot of them are.”

THE STATUS QUO

Leipold took some time during the press conference reintroducing Kotelnicki to address emphatically why he did not make wider-ranging changes to his coaching staff. He said if Kotelnicki had not become available, “we would have stayed status quo.”

“We all can sit there and we can pick out three or four plays, and some of the things that everybody’s wanting change and wanting certain things to happen, we would not even be talking about those,” he said. “The margin of error’s small — we’ve said that for five years in here. And it continues to be small. But at the same time we have to progress and I can’t stick my head in the sand on it and (need to) find ways for us to make our offense and our defense better.”

Leipold said KU needs to improve in numerous ways — delivering in the red zone, avoiding late-game turnovers and so on — but he advocated for grace for KU’s first-year coordinators from 2025, Zebrowski on offense and D.K. McDonald on defense: “I would think everybody in this room was better at their job the second year than they were the first year.”

He said he had “been told about how disappointing last year was” on defense but attributed it to growing pains with an entirely new set of cornerbacks, safeties and linebackers, who were also going through schematic changes in McDonald’s first year.

More broadly, in any event, Leipold pointed out that you can search social media and find people criticizing any coordinator or head coach of a losing team on any given weekend.

“We’re in a society right now where we want everything instantly, we want change right away when something doesn’t go right,” Leipold said. “And I wasn’t about that, I’ve never been about that, I won’t be about that.”