photo by: Kansas Athletics

Kansas safety Corey Gordon tackles West Virginia quarterback Michael Hawkins Jr. on Saturday, Nov. 14, 2026, in Morgantown, W.Va.

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Kansas defensive coordinator D.K. McDonald said in the lead-up to KU’s matchup with West Virginia that if his defensive players were out of their gaps, they were going to be hearing “Take Me Home, Country Roads” quite a bit.

As it turned out, with KU limiting WVU to 35 rushing yards on 37 carries, the only place the Jayhawks had to hear it was in their own locker room in the bowels of Milan Puskar Stadium, as they sang along to the Mountaineers’ signature song amid the jubilation of a 37-14 road victory.

It’s the sort of win KU hasn’t experienced in a while. The Jayhawks won a road game for the first time since Oct. 4, 2025. They beat a Big 12 foe by the largest margin since Sept. 20, 2025 (also against WVU). And they won as an underdog — and depending how you assess such matters, it might be the first time since they beat BYU on Nov. 16, 2024.

They’ll need to beat BYU as a large underdog again next Saturday if they want to continue their quest for a bowl bid. But in the meantime, they’ll take at least a little time to enjoy an uncommon sort of win after two agonizing defeats.

“I told our group, I told our team … how proud I was of them last night in our evening meeting,” KU coach Lance Leipold said, “about their work ethic, their character, how they’ve approached some of the tough times and they’ve stuck together and they’ve worked extremely hard, and they came out and played aggressively and it pays off. You just don’t know when.

“And for them to put together the type of game that they did as we’ve been waiting for something like this all year — we’ve been close at times — but to go out and play (like) that is very well deserved on their part.”

The KU offense played its best half of the season against power-conference competition, but unlike in previous weeks (against teams like Arizona State, UCF and Utah), it didn’t wait until it was incredibly far behind to get going. And even against one of the most explosive offenses in the Big 12 and the country, the defense continued to display the sort of form that has kept KU in games all year long.

But the Jayhawks have no illusions about the fact that even more will be required if they want to sneak into the postseason.

“At the end of the day, we still got to correct some stuff,” said defensive end Leroy Harris III, who had eight tackles, two for loss, with a pass breakup that yielded an interception. “We still got two more games that we got to win so we can be that bowl-eligible team that we want to be.”

Quarterback Isaiah Marshall cited the “24-hour rule.”

“We got to still attack the next day, have a great week of practice,” Marshall said. “Of course, we’re playing a good BYU team. So just watch film, get better and just attack the day, and don’t let this win get to our head.”

Here are more of the biggest takeaways from the Jayhawks’ resounding win on Saturday.

• What a nice way for linebacker Trey Lathan to bring his career full circle.

“It felt good, just being here, where I started my career, just seeing some of the things that I used to go to every day, I used to hang out, seeing my old apartment,” Lathan said. “It was just a crazy feeling coming back here.”

The fifth-year linebacker, who started his career as a Mountaineer, had already pledged to give $50 for each tackle this season to both WVU Medicine Golisano Children’s Hospital and Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in his home state of Florida. He had 62 tackles to his name prior to Saturday and added eight more against his former team, which brought his donation to a clean $7,000 in total.

But Lathan said postgame that he planned to both double the value of what he accumulated on Saturday and throw in an extra $1,000, increasing that total to $8,800.

“I have a lot of people, a lot of people back home, a lot of people that’s close to me that’s willing to match my donation, so it’s a good feeling,” Lathan said.

While his tackles brought an additional philanthropic benefit, the Jayhawks themselves certainly reaped the rewards of Lathan’s early interception, his second in consecutive weeks as well as his second in consecutive seasons facing WVU. This time, Harris got his hands on WVU quarterback Michael Hawkins Jr.’s first pass attempt, which promptly dropped to Lathan as he headed toward the ground.

“I just seen the quarterback take a step back, so I just tried to get in my drop immediately,” Lathan said. “And then Leroy –the second week in a row, Leroy and David (Santiago), they tipped the ball to me, so I told them that i got to take them out to dinner or something, because those guys, they made plays, man.”

When Santiago’s pass rush had produced Lathan’s early interception against UCF, Lathan ended up fumbling, with the ball recovered by Marcus Calvin. When a reporter joked on Saturday about how Lathan was already down when he picked off Hawkins this time, eliminating the possibility of another fumble, Lathan said, “I was actually kind of upset, because I felt like if I was just a little bit faster, got out of my break, I feel like I would have had a pick-6.”

In any case, his play had far-reaching consequences on how the game developed.

“Hawkins is such a dynamic player and so dangerous, and I don’t think we ever let him fully get into that rhythm,” Leipold said. “The interception, I think, really took a little bit out of them. We put enough pressure on him consistently that it didn’t really allow them to throw the ball vertically down the field, probably as much as maybe they wanted to.”

• In general, the KU defense seems to be playing with so much more confidence this season — for the most part, it’s been quite justified — than in previous years, and the personality of defensive coordinator D.K. McDonald has blossomed in turn, including with some increasingly pithy press-conference turns of phrase.

Another aspect of his personality was on full display on Saturday night as McDonald, a former cornerback at Division II Edinboro, was seen moving at high speed down the sideline to track his own cornerbacks’ work against a pair of deep shots by Hawkins on Saturday. Midway through the second quarter, he ran in to celebrate with both arms raised when Jalen Todd knocked away a deep ball intended for Prince Strachan. Early in the third, he arrived just in time to pick up the ball and signal for incomplete when Hawkins underthrew DJ Epps as the receiver battled with nickel back Elijah Cannon.

It was an entertaining display of emotion from the second-year coordinator.

• As critical as I and others have been of Matt Gill this year, the Australian freshman punter deserves some plaudits for a steady outing on Saturday, one in which all four of his punts, which took place exclusively in the second half, landed inside the 20-yard line.

One short punt from WVU’s 39-yard line bounced perfectly and got downed at the 2 by Donald Collier; another came to rest at the 5 while encircled by Jayhawks. A couple more low rollers, eschewed by the Mountaineer return man, took favorable bounces for KU. In short, it wasn’t necessarily pretty, but they all made it there.

Martin Connington missed an extra point, which Leipold said was the result of a poor hold by Hollis Moeller, but otherwise it was a better day on special teams. WVU was very conservative in deciding whether or not to return kicks, but it only managed one return as Dane Efird produced three fair catches and three touchbacks.

“For the way our kickers have been the last few weeks, our kickers and punters, they all responded,” Leipold said.

• The Jayhawks avoided one potential special-teams blunder in rather appropriate fashion. When Tate Nagy got hit by Nick Taylor and fumbled on a punt return late in the third quarter, linebacker Malachi Curvey and cornerback Robert Reddick demonstrated excellent presence of mind to dive for the ball immediately, which exemplified how KU seemed to be one step ahead of WVU all day.

Then Curvey made the recovery, but it didn’t matter anyway because the Mountaineers had lined up in an illegal formation, so the fumble wouldn’t have counted even if they did recover.

That was a recurring theme of the day for WVU, which got whistled for offsides on two different fourth-down attempts in the second quarter, on one of which it might have stopped Marshall if not for the penalty — which could have yielded a significant momentum swing prior to halftime. Instead, the Jayhawks scored a touchdown on that particular drive.

• That’s when WVU engaged in some truly terrible pre-halftime execution. In some ways it was worse than even what KU has done during some of its most ignominious sequences prior to the break.

The Mountaineers took over with 45 seconds left in the half and no timeouts remaining, after KU had scored touchdowns on consecutive drives to go up 30-7. It made sense for WVU to at least attempt some semblance of a drive given that it was to get the ball back after halftime.

On first down, Hawkins threw a 5-yard out route for Cyrus Traugh, who was not even close to the sideline when the ball arrived, meaning that if he had caught it WVU would have lost a great deal of clock. Trey Brown forced an incompletion, so that oversight didn’t matter. On the next play, Harris sprinted around right tackle Malik Agbo and threw Hawkins down with one arm for a sack.

At that point, facing third-and-17 on their own 11-yard line with the clock ticking down toward 20 seconds, the Mountaineers probably should have cut their losses. (It’s worth noting that KU had two timeouts at this point and was not using them.) Instead Hawkins threw short to Ryan Ward, who bizarrely went out of bounds, stopping the clock whether KU wanted to do so or not.

It was such a poor drive that it actually prompted the Jayhawks, upon receiving the ball at their own 38-yard line with eight seconds left, to attempt a legitimate passing play, maybe looking to set up for a Hail Mary. It didn’t work, but that choice was a rarity under Leipold and a sign of just how much KU was dominating the flow of the game at that point.

• The Jayhawks ultimately didn’t suffer too much of a disruption as a result of the nationwide air-travel ground stop on Friday afternoon, before which they had already arrived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Their game moved just two hours earlier on Saturday to switch with Arizona State-UCF, although Leipold said he had initially anticipated potentially moving an additional hour and a half up to the TCU-Kansas State slot when the Wildcats weren’t able to make it down to Texas on Friday.

KU had some logistics to manage in terms of condensing its morning schedule, but it ultimately worked out well. And flight records suggest the Jayhawks left North Central West Virginia Airport in nearby Clarksburg without issue on Saturday night.

Leipold praised his chief of staff Michael Painter: “Michael’s done a great job. You think about it, if there’s a (director of football operations) of the year, between moving the Utah game, moving this game and going to London, he’s MVP.”