Kansas defensive back Robert Reddick (26) and Kansas safety Christian Pritchett (20) celebrate following the Jayhawks’ 25-24 win over Baylor on Saturday, Oct. 24, 2026 at David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium. Nick Krug/Special to the Journal-World

After watching BYU deploy trick plays to great effect in its impressive victory over Notre Dame on Oct. 17, Kansas coach Lance Leipold went back to work the following day with a message to his coaches: “You know, let’s not be afraid to dial a few up.”

Associate head coach Andy Kotelnicki certainly doesn’t lack creativity, but there have been times this season that his offense has looked at least a bit more straightforward than in earlier years — and it’s hard not to tie that to his desire to make managing games at least a little bit easier for first-time starting quarterback Isaiah Marshall.

On Saturday, KU got something much closer to the full Kotelnicki experience, and never was it fuller than on fourth-and-3 at Baylor’s 34-yard line on the first play of the fourth quarter.

It was a stunning time — down 21-10 with the game essentially on the line — for KU to do what it did, which was slide its entire offensive line and running back Dylan Edwards down to the bottom of the field, leaving Marshall all alone behind tight end Carson Bruhn, who was serving as the ersatz center.

At first it looked like a disaster in the making. Marshall said postgame that KU was trying to get Bruhn open in the flat with a pick play. But Cam Pickett didn’t really do anything to free Bruhn up from Baylor’s Garrick Ponder. Then Pickett himself was blanketed by Daniel Cobbs, and Jailen Butler’s hitch route put him right between a pair of Bears.

There was one more option.

“I told myself not to panic, just stay calm and just keep going through my reads, and I (saw) Nik on the corner,” Marshall said.

Nik McMillan was not actually open by any reasonable definition, but as Marshall noted postgame, he did have a small step on cornerback Reggie Bush II.

Then there was the matter of getting enough on the ball while throwing off his back foot, “just trying to give him a chance there,” Marshall said. “And when I threw it, the guy was in my face, so I ain’t see him catch it at first until he fell down.”

McMillan got the jump on Bush, snagged the ball and stumbled back into the end zone for a key touchdown that cut KU’s deficit back to one possession.

That play improved KU’s win probability from 7.9% to 21.2%, according to ESPN Analytics, and it was one of a few notable successes for Kotelnicki on the day, including a pass play that generated Bruhn’s first career touchdown by leaving him completely uncovered up the seam in a way that surely made KU fans reminisce about Mason Fairchild. Indeed, Leipold said that was a play KU has used in the past.

Creating this kind of stress against an accomplished Baylor defense with one of the best fronts in the league was no small feat. The schematic advantage of having Kotelnicki was supposed to help KU score some points it wasn’t supposed to this season by causing confusion. That really hadn’t worked out that way all that much prior to Saturday, but if the Jayhawks can keep it going, who knows what other defenses might fall prey to plays like McMillan’s?

TCU will be the next challenge at Amon G. Carter Stadium on Saturday at 2:30 p.m., but for now, here’s more of what we learned from KU’s 25-24 victory over the Bears.

• Marshall’s late drive on Saturday, which turned out to be game-winning, was pretty efficient, as the Jayhawks only needed a little over a minute to reach the end zone when Marshall took a quarterback draw 15 yards for the score.

That was an impressive display of maturity from the young quarterback after an absolutely brutal interception, returned for a touchdown early in the third quarter, that helped put KU in a hole in the first place. (Marshall said he thought Pickett was going to run a hitch, but the result was a pick-6, one that he was able to shake off when it counted.)

“Unfortunately there’s going to still maybe be those, and we just talked about a very similar type (of) throw to the middle of the field in the end zone (against Kansas State) that you wish he could pull back, but he continues to play with confidence and understanding,” Leipold said. “He owns things when things don’t go his way. I still think he made a lot of good throws today and did some things with his legs as we need.”

But Marshall was so effective late that it seemed KU may have scored too early — especially after the Jayhawks’ unsuccessful two-point conversion, which left the margin at 25-24 with a veteran quarterback and solid kicker on the opposite sideline, not to mention more than a minute remaining and all three timeouts for Baylor.

In several similar situations in recent years, KU has taken a late lead and relinquished it even later, like at Arizona State in 2024 or against Cincinnati in 2025. But as Leipold pointed out postgame, this is not a team with the luxury of deciding when to score.

“We’re not going to sit there,” Leipold said. “We haven’t played at a (level) where we’re going to pick and choose how that happens, and when, and all those. You got to win on both sides of the ball and that’s what we chose to do.”

Marshall felt confident in the approach that KU chose given how well the Jayhawks’ defense was playing: “I knew we just had to score,” he said. “It wasn’t no ‘Try and waste more time,’ because we just had to score.”

Certainly KU didn’t make it easy. The 34-yard reception by Gavin Freeman between three defenders was reminiscent of something a Cincinnati receiver might have done on that final drive last season. But the Bears were very passive once they reached the edge of field goal range, and they paid the price when Blake Herold blocked Rhett Armstrong’s attempt at a game-winning kick.

• Leipold has come in for criticism at times during his tenure, especially in 2025, for conservative decision-making. Well, no one could take issue with his approach on those grounds on Saturday. The Jayhawks attempted eight fourth downs against Baylor and converted five, an impressive success rate to be sure, and one that helped mitigate the inconsistency of KU’s punting and kicking games.

“There’s some of that that was circumstantial,” Leipold said. “There’s some that we hadn’t punted the ball as well as we’d like to flip the field position. But the majority of those, there’s a couple that maybe we were backed up that was maybe fourth-and-1 or 2, but the other ones were kind of in that midfield range, (having) confidence in our defense that if it didn’t work out, but staying aggressive.”

During his KU tenure, Leipold had never before attempted more than five fourth downs in a game.

Some of them were ugly. Marshall threw one interception on a misfire on KU’s opening drive. He nearly threw another on a fourth-and-1 looking for Leyton Cure late in the first half. But he also had some success with quarterback sneaks, Edwards and Bruhn converted once each and of course there was the big touchdown to McMillan.

This provided a key axis of differentiation for the Jayhawks on Saturday because Baylor did not have much success on fourth down. The Bears punched in a fourth-and-goal from the 1-yard line early in the game with running back Dawson Pendergrass, but quarterback DJ Lagway mishandled a pair of attempts at other points in the first half when Baylor was deep in KU territory.

• Edwards has had an up-and-down season, one affected somewhat by the premature loss of his expected backfield running mate Yasin Willis, but on Saturday he handled his increased workload with aplomb. He smashed his career high with 30 carries against what was supposed to be a formidable front and ran for 156 yards; maybe his best play of all didn’t count, as it was a toss he took for a touchdown that was called back due to holding.

“This defense was a real good defense,” Edwards said. “Our coach told us Baylor was probably going to be one of the best defenses we played all year, and we came out here and balled out against them.”

Leipold said he hoped it’d be a “springboard” for similar performances from Edwards going forward: “I thought he ran hard, as hard as he’s run since he’s been here, with confidence and understanding and some physicality and the contact.”

“The O-line played great and I executed off my opportunities I got,” Edwards added.

It was also refreshing to see the Jayhawks incorporate some other options in the backfield with reasonable success. KU has not given Colorado State transfer Jalen Dupree a lot of opportunities this year, and earlier in the week Kotelnicki said that Dupree (who has battled injuries), Khijohnn Cummings-Coleman (who switched positions from safety) and Chase Belcher (who joined the team at midseason after earning an injunction) are all still in a mode where they’re trying to learn a lot from their in-season reps.

Well, Belcher, a journeyman formerly of Northern Arizona, West Georgia and Kennesaw State, debuted with six carries for 24 yards and ran hard. Cummings-Coleman had two carries for six yards, one of which came on a toss play similar to Edwards’ on a key third down.

• It didn’t end up meaning all that much in the grand scheme of things because Edwards got stuffed on a fourth down not long afterward, but Trey Lathan’s interception of Lagway midway through the fourth quarter was the sort of takeaway for which this defense has been desperate this season.

It was KU’s second interception of the year, and a redemptive moment for Lathan in particular after Lagway had shaken off two attempts at sacks over the course of the game, including once earlier on the drive to lead to a big play.

Lathan had an amusing description of how he snagged the ball after it deflected off teammates Taylor Davis and Bam Crouch: “I was like, ‘Man, it’s my turn now.’ I done gave them chances, but I was like, ‘It’s my turn.'”

• If Armstrong had gotten a somewhat higher trajectory on his final kick, maybe the story of the game would have been an illegal substitution penalty on KU’s Leroy Harris III that turned a potential third-and-26 midway through the third quarter into second-and-11, and three points at most into seven.

Baylor, which entered Saturday playing at the fastest pace of any team in the country, relied heavily on tempo all day. With KU trailing 14-10, the Bears hustled up to the line of scrimmage on a second-and-16 from KU’s 27-yard line and Lagway promptly got thrown down for a big loss by Dakyus Brinkley. But on review, officials determined that Harris hadn’t gotten off the field in time, charging a five-yard penalty, and Baylor scored a touchdown three plays later.

It looked at first glance like referee Kevin Mar, who had been holding his arms straight out in a “T” shape to indicate that the teams were substituting, stopped doing so too early, prompting his fellow official to let Baylor snap the ball while Harris was still running off the field.

Leipold explained afterward that KU had told Harris he was fine because the referee had his arms out. He was frustrated that when the substitution went to replay, the conference’s replay center didn’t have adequate context on what had happened.

“And so the replay center took over the call,” Leipold said. “And at the end, I would have to give credit to the white hat because he took ownership of it when it was all said and done.”

Leipold added that he will be making a call to get a better explanation on how he should instruct his players going forward.

• Kickoffs continue to be a glaring issue for the Jayhawks. They essentially had to bench kickoff specialist Dane Efird during this game and opted to have Martin Connington do pooch-kicks on several of the attempts in his place. Baylor’s Jayden McGowan produced returns of 51 and 36 yards that substantially boosted his team’s field position.

Punter Matt Gill had another lackluster kick early in the game that prompted scattered boos from the KU fans, but in a similar situation to those in which he had struggled against Arizona State and Kansas State, he did manage to flip the field with a career-best 66-yard boot.