Kansas head coach Lance Leipold flashes a smile after a timeout during the fourth quarter on Friday, Sept. 4, 2026 at David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium. Photo by Nick Krug

The Kansas football team did not start the season in the most glamorous possible form with a six-point first quarter against FCS Long Island, before the Jayhawks settled for a field goal early in the second.

But as head coach Lance Leipold pointed out afterward, it’s hard to take too much issue with a game in which his team never punted — depriving newly acquired Australian freshman Matt Gill, it must be said, of his first-ever American football action.

“I told the team this: Games like this that you’re heavily favored, I think everybody wants you to score one touchdown right away that’s worth like 30 points,” Leipold said. “OK, everybody’s expecting everything to happen right away, and when it doesn’t, then you’re underperforming or something.”

In any event, it didn’t take KU much longer to reach the 30-point mark he mentioned. A couple of crisp deep balls from new quarterback Isaiah Marshall to Nik McMillan and Nahzae Cox later, KU had two more touchdowns under its belt, and it tacked on one more before the half on the way to what became a dominant 51-6 victory over the Sharks on Friday night.

How much does it tell us about what might lie ahead for the Jayhawks in their remaining 11 regular-season games, beginning on Friday against Missouri? More than you might think, given the level of competition. The first sample of bona fide Jayhawk football this year was revelatory in quite a few ways.

Here’s more of what we learned on Friday night.

• The Jayhawks made a change to their pregame routine ahead of the 7 p.m. tipoff in deeply unpleasant late-summer heat. They conducted many of their early warmups within the indoor practice facility: “Never done anything like that,” head coach Lance Leipold said. “Modified the heat, tried to keep ourselves as fresh as possible.”

Leipold said not to expect the new protocol to become a fixture for KU. Temperatures are expected to be somewhat more manageable for the upcoming Border War.

“We adjusted to it, but I mean, it was a necessary thing,” defensive end Leroy Harris III said. “They said it was going to be hot in there … but it was definitely different, I would say, for sure, not being on the game field.”

• KU spent much of its offseason discussing its newfound depth, and linebacker was one position for which that talking point came up particularly often. It looks like it’ll be tested right away, because Boston College transfer Bam Crouch went down with a shoulder injury on the Jayhawks’ fourth defensive play of the season. Head coach Lance Leipold didn’t have more specifics postgame.

New Mexico State transfer Quincy Davis, listed as the backup middle linebacker, slotted in comfortably on the weak side. If Crouch is out for any extended period of time, expect redshirt freshman Malachi Curvey and Marshall transfer Jibreel Al-Amin to factor in as well.

• Leipold was not especially pleased with a second-half targeting call against safety Khijohnn Cummings-Coleman that cut short his KU debut. Cummings-Coleman charged in to tackle LIU receiver Jayden Simpson and got ejected for what Leipold called “as good a football tackle as you’re going to see.”

“That would be in a demo tape for us, probably, and it probably still will be,” he added.

On the bright side for the Jayhawks, Cummings-Coleman can still play in the first half against the Tigers on Friday because of new NCAA rules that do not prompt a suspension for a player’s first targeting penalty of the year.

• His athleticism will draw the attention of fans, reporters and, going forward, opposing defensive coordinators, but Marshall is not by any means a pure runner at the quarterback position. He showed exceptional touch, both on the aforementioned pair of deep balls to his transfer wideouts and on a 19-yard touchdown to McMillan before halftime.

At the same time, he’s still a young quarterback bound to make some mistakes, and he was lucky to get out of his full-time debut without a significant blunder. Two separate errant passes he threw bounced harmlessly off opposing linebackers, with one falling to the turf and one directly into the hands of receiver Tate Nagy.

• Nagy, as evidenced by the tip drill for his first career touchdown, continues to provide a unique sort of chaotic energy for KU, much as he did as a freshman. Before the season, he asserted that he planned to get more vertical on punt returns. Well, there was still quite a lot of horizontality on display against Long Island.

When he wasn’t bailing Marshall out in the end zone, he was also responsible for a third-and-19 catch from Cole Ballard on which, as Leipold noted, “he makes about five guys miss to convert a first down,” and ultimately for returning five punts for 48 yards. He is not afraid to take chances in the return game — there were years in which KU wouldn’t return five punts in half a season — and so far it hasn’t hurt his team at all.

• The athleticism of KU’s defensive ends is no joke. Harris made four tackles that were exclusively in the backfield for losses. David Santiago, the standout of camp, was all over the place himself and forced and recovered a fumble by stripping the ball from an LIU running back: “Wish he could have got maybe a touchdown,” Harris said. “That lineman got him. I was excited for him, excited that he got that.”

Even though they’ll have much tougher tests getting off blocks against opposing linemen, beginning as soon as next week, the lateral agility they displayed to disrupt outside runs will certainly carry over.

“They play hard and they played pretty well,” Leipold said. “I’ve said Leroy’s kind of picking up a little bit where he left off last year and becoming even more of a force at times, and we’ve talked about David Santiago a long time through camp, and how steady, and he’s a physical player.”

• It’s hard to imagine the KU offense will look anything like it did on Friday night when the Jayhawks take the field against Missouri. Outside of a bizarre swinging-gate two-point conversion attempt that did not bear fruit, the Jayhawks were quite vanilla by Andy Kotelnicki’s standards. They didn’t employ the characteristic presnap motions that made him a darling of the coaching world during his first tenure at KU. At times they ran the ball up the middle out of unadorned formations several plays in a row.

That’s not to say they’ll eschew power football against the Tigers, but they’ll certainly employ much more misdirection. The question will be how effectively Marshall and company can execute it.