With Mark Mangino, Glen Mason looking on, Jayhawks get most impressive win of season

On a day when Kansas honored bright moments of its football past, the present shined. The Jayhawks hammered UCF 51-22 with a performance that got former star running back Tony Sands emotional at halftime.

OK, it wasn’t the KU dominance as much as Sands, along with linebacker Nick Reid, entering the schools’ Ring of Honor that had Sands in tears. Their names join the likes of Ray Evans, John Hadl, John Riggins and Gale Sayers outlining Memorial Stadium.

The tributes were fitting for former conference players of the year: Sands in 1991, for a career that was punctuated by a then NCAA-record 396 rushing yards against Missouri; and Reid, a dominant defender who defined the hard-nosed Jayhawks in the mid-2000s.

The presence of their coaches added to the occasion. Mark Mangino and Glen Mason, the program’s winningest coaches since 1910, addressed the team on Friday evening and stood with the Reid and Sands families at halftime. Had this celebration occurred in most of the previous 15 seasons, the ceremony would easily have been the highlight of the day.

Not now, and not with this coach. The trajectory of the Jayhawks under Lance Leipold feels precisely like that of Mason and Mangino. Mason needed three seasons starting in 1988 to dig out of the muck before turning a winning season. Mangino’s second team went bowling. Both coached teams that finished in the top 10 and were multiple bowl winners.

They’ve remained friends of the program in their post-coaching lives, and Mason, who while working as a commentator for the Big Ten Network caught the occasional Buffalo game. His advice to Kansas when the job became available three years ago: “You better hire Lance.”

Mangino’s message to the team on Friday was simple.

“Thank you,” Mangino said. “Thank you for restoring pride in this program.”

Mangino said over the years that he’d hear from and commiserate with his former KU players who suffered through the constant last place Big 12 finishes.

“Now it’s not a situation where it’s embarrassing for those guys,” Mangino said. “They’re happy for their alma mater. I told them it will get better. Well, it got better. Lance showed. Travis showed up.”

That’s athletic director Travis Goff, who last week delivered a letter to Kansas fans imploring their support and challenging them to fill the stadium for the remaining home games. A few empties in the corners on Saturday, but mostly a crowd similar to those in the best of Kansas football days.

Reid is one of those fans. He’s a season-ticket holder who watched plenty of bad teams from the stands.

“There was quite a long period of time, it wasn’t a whole lot of fun to be a KU fan,” Reid said. “Coach Leipold and the kids have it going in the right direction, and I think they’re going to keep it going.”

The Jayhawks improved to 5-1, and this was the most impressive triumph of the season. Kansas looked good early against Illinois and late against BYU. Saturday, as an underdog, the Jayhawks went wire-to-wire behind backup quarterback Jason Bean, a Devin Neal/Daniel Hishaw running game that netted 399 yards and special teams that produced a punt-return touchdown and a kickoff return to midfield.

A proficient running game is important for a couple of reasons: It allows KU to control the clock, which works well against fast-pace offenses like UCF, while taking passing-game pressure off Bean. And it means the Jayhawks are stout up front, the true measure of Big 12 belonging.

It also helped, Leipold said, that Bean had the week to prepare with the first team and wasn’t thrust into the start the morning of the game, as was the case last week against Texas when Jalon Daniels couldn’t go with a back injury. (Daniels, as a precaution, was not on the sideline for Saturday’s game.)

Saturday’s game worried the coach for another reason.

“This is a really good bounce back for us, for this program,” Leipold said. “I had my concerns, to be quite honest, because of last week.”

But Kansas was ready, scoring on the first three possessions. And if UCF, down 24-0 at halftime, was determined to make a stand and reverse the game’s flow to open the second half, Neal’s 75-yard touchdown run on the first snap crushed any such notion.

With the season at the midway point for the Jayhawks, where do they fit into the Big 12 chase? They owned the same record at this point last year, and becoming bowl eligible seemed to be the objective then. This season there could be more in store.

With six league games remaining, Kansas could find itself thinking about what it will take to reach the conference champion game and have a season similar to the teams coached by the icons who looked on Saturday.