photo by: Columbia Athletics/Stockton Photo

Columbia wide receiver Bryson Canty carries the ball ahead against Georgetown on Saturday, Sept. 24, 2022, in Washington, D.C.

Among the 22 transfers from whom the Kansas football team has earned commitments in the winter portal window, approximately half are entering their final year of collegiate eligibility, with the exact number yet to be determined as some players could earn medical waivers to play additional seasons.

With such a high number of experienced additions, KU will be expecting each of these players to leave their mark in 2025. All of them will be needed because of how many longtime contributors the Jayhawks lost to graduation following the 2024 season.

Even among about a dozen options, though, a select few transfers rise to the top as the most likely to contribute to KU’s success this fall.

Below are my picks for the top five. I excluded all transfers whom I had previously selected as likely to make a multi-year impact in the first part of this ranking published earlier this week. Among the five members of that list, the top two, offensive lineman Tyler Mercer and linebacker Trey Lathan, have a high likelihood of contributing in 2025 as well, but their eligibility beyond next season made them vastly stronger choices for the criteria I laid out in that story.

5. Bryson Canty

The newest member (so far) of KU’s corps of transfer wide receiver additions has had the most productive career of the four. A two-time first-team All-Ivy League selection, Canty tallied 43 catches for a career-best 760 yards and nine touchdowns during his redshirt junior season at Columbia, which happened to be one of the best in Columbia’s recent history.

Cam Pickett, from Ball State, has only produced in one season as he enters his fourth year of college football after dealing with injuries; Levi Wentz, who joins KU from Albany, has gradually built up his own credentials but is still relatively new to playing receiver at the collegiate level after converting from cornerback.

Alabama transfer Emmanuel Henderson Jr., meanwhile, may be the most fascinating pickup of KU’s entire transfer class. He was a former five-star (by some services) running back out of high school whom Alabama converted into a peripheral player at wideout, but had to play behind the likes of Germie Bernard and Ryan Williams, and it wouldn’t shock anyone if he ran away with KU’s No. 1 wide receiver job. Still, it’s hard to argue with the fact that he’s made just five career catches in three seasons and doesn’t have a record of consistent targets at this point.

With all that in mind, Canty therefore would seem to have the highest floor and the greatest likelihood of immediate success in 2025.

Now, it’s worth noting two key points against Canty. First of all, according to multiple reports, Canty won’t join the Jayhawks until the summer, following the completion of his spring semester at Columbia. That will obviously set him back and give the remaining wide receivers opportunities to carve out roles in the spring. But the success of past summer additions like center Bryce Foster indicates that a player who’s a quick study can catch up in due time.

In addition, while Henderson has trained against SEC defensive backs, Canty spent four seasons playing against non-scholarship FCS athletes. Still, his Pro Football Focus grades, such as an 85.3 overall score in 2024, indicate that he was indeed on a different plane of talent than much of his competition.

photo by: AP Photo/Young Kwak

Arizona tight end Keyan Burnett (88) runs a route while pressured by Washington State defensive back Cam Lampkin (3) during the first half of an NCAA college football game, Saturday, Oct. 14, 2023, in Pullman, Wash.

4. Keyan Burnett

Burnett, who ranks as the highest-graded transfer in KU’s entire 21-player class on 247Sports, was once part of a quartet of players from Servite High School in Anaheim, California, who entered the Arizona program with great fanfare, along with quarterback Noah Fifita, wide receiver Tetairoa McMillan and linebacker Jacob Manu. Now, after battling some injuries, he’ll get a chance to help shape another program in Lawrence in his final season of eligibility.

One-year KU offensive coordinator Jeff Grimes used to talk about how he came to realize he needed to deploy four separate players — Tevita Ahoafi-Noa, Jared Casey, Leyton Cure and Trevor Kardell — to recreate former tight end Mason Fairchild in the aggregate. Grimes is gone to Wisconsin, but new OC Jim Zebrowski and the KU staff will likely expect they have two potential one-to-one replacements for Fairchild in Burnett and former Iowa State transfer DeShawn Hanika. Both have the size at 6-foot-6 and about 250 pounds to serve as prominent red-zone targets for quarterback Jalon Daniels, both have strong track records as blockers and both will likely compete for the starting role in 2025 — but still play quite a bit regardless because of KU’s fondness for sets with multiple tight ends.

Hanika has the advantage of a year in Lawrence and therefore increased familiarity with KU’s schemes, but then again Zebrowski will debut as the OC, and Hanika hasn’t played in a football game since 2022 after a betting-related suspension at Iowa State in 2023 and a season-long leg injury in 2024. Burnett, meanwhile, dealt with injuries himself but still managed to play eight games at Arizona last year. His 18 catches for 217 yards and a touchdown in that limited action compare well to Hanika’s 17 catches for 244 yards and four touchdowns at ISU in 2022.

photo by: AP Photo/Jose Juarez

Michigan running back Donovan Edwards (7) dives for yardage as he is tackled by Bowling Green linebacker Joseph Sipp Jr. (3) in the first quarter of an NCAA college football game, Saturday, Sept. 16, 2023, in Ann Arbor, Mich.

3. Joseph Sipp Jr.

Sipp follows in the footsteps of his former Bowling Green teammate JB Brown by making the move to Kansas. Brown excelled with the Jayhawks and earned an All-Big 12 honorable mention in 2024; Sipp could be in line to record some more honors of his own after he was first-team All-MAC this past season.

The competition for playing time at linebacker will be wide open for KU in 2024, but given how young the rest of the Jayhawks’ roster is, the transfer trio of Lathan, Sipp and former South Carolina and Pittsburgh linebacker Bangally Kamara will likely earn the majority of snaps at the middle and weak-side linebacker positions, the ones that were occupied by Cornell Wheeler and Brown last year with Taiwan Berryhill Jr. filling in periodically at both.

Sipp played inside linebacker at Bowling Green. That positional fit could potentially cause Sipp’s role to conflict in particular with that of Lathan, a longtime starter at middle linebacker for West Virginia. But Berryhill’s frequent opportunities to rotate in even after Wheeler returned from injury in 2024 served to demonstrate that KU will take the opportunity to deploy multiple linebackers even if its top two are healthy.

photo by: AP Photo/Julio Cortez

Texas defensive end Justice Finkley waits for a play during the first half of an NCAA college football game between TCU and Texas, Saturday, Nov. 11, 2023, in Fort Worth, Texas. Texas won 29-26.

2. Justice Finkley

The newest addition to KU’s transfer class is also one of the most important. Finkley, an edge rusher, is one of several incoming transfers for KU with proven production at a power-conference level, joining the likes of Burnett, Kamara, Lathan, safety Lyrik Rawls (Oklahoma State) and running back Leshon Williams (Iowa). The fact that he played at a national powerhouse like Texas with NFL-caliber players on the defensive line the past several years makes his record of extensive playing time (more than 500 snaps in 32 career games) all the more impressive.

Clearly he’s an accomplished player, even if he got fewer opportunities as Texas added dominant freshman defensive end Colin Simmons. But beyond his skill set, Finkley comes in so high on this list because of the opportunity KU provides him for significant action.

At 250 pounds, Finkley’s blend of speed and power will make him an ideal option at the strong-side defensive end spot. The Jayhawks faced a complete void on the strong side entering 2025, and well into the winter portal window, after losing all three of Jereme Robinson, Dylan Wudke and Ronald McGee — who acquitted themselves well last season — to graduation. KU had swung and missed on a number of promising portal prospects. But in the end, the Jayhawks reeled in Finkley, who now becomes the immediate presumptive starter at the position.

Otherwise, they would have had to rely on reshaping the bodies of current weak-side ends Bai Jobe or Dylan Brooks, neither of whom is particularly experienced, in order to find someone to play opposite Dean Miller.

photo by: AP Photo/Keith Srakocic

Pittsburgh linebacker Bangally Kamara (11) blocks a pass by Rhode Island quarterback Kasim Hill (8) during the first half of an NCAA college football game, Saturday, Sept. 24, 2022, in Pittsburgh.

1. Bangally Kamara

The first transfer KU secured in this year’s portal cycle — and in fact, the widely reported first transfer commitment for any team, given that he made his pledge way back in November — is also the most likely to hit the ground running as a first-year Jayhawk.

Kamara earns this spot for several key reasons. The first is what he has in common with Finkley: extensive playing experience at the highest levels of college football. He will be a sixth-year senior in 2025, but as early as 2022 he was starting for Pitt as its “Star” linebacker, before taking on the “Money” role the following season; in his career he has played 1,333 defensive snaps. The vast majority of his action came against ACC foes before his brief stint in the SEC with South Carolina in 2024. In his last full year at Pitt, he tallied 55 tackles with 6.5 for loss.

The other point in Kamara’s favor is his versatility, something linebackers coach Chris Simpson values greatly. Spring practice and fall camp will bear out exactly which positions Kamara, Lathan and Sipp take on in KU’s front seven — which could also look a little different under defensive coordinator D.K. McDonald, in ways yet to be determined — and the transfers will also have gotten a sense in their early discussions with the coaches of how they fit in schematically. But it has to be a point in Kamara’s favor that he demonstrated he could start in two different spots at Pitt. The Star role is coverage-heavy, almost like KU’s Hawk position, while the Money position is a more traditional weak-side linebacker spot.

If Kamara is a true outside linebacker, that could minimize his positional overlap with other linebackers vying for opportunities this fall.