Blog Article
Is Lance Leipold on the Hot Seat? 5 Tells That Separate a Blip From a Slide at Kansas
Is Lance Leipold really on the hot seat at Kansas? Five ways to tell if a coach bounces back or keeps sliding, run start to finish on the Jayhawks.
Every offseason, the preseason magazines sort last year’s 5-7 teams into “bounce-back” and “rebuild” based on almost nothing, and every fall, half of those calls fall apart. There is a better way to read it, and it is the method we use here at Coaches Hot Seat to rank coaching pressure.
One note, if you are new. Our ranking is a thermometer, not a firing prediction. It measures how much heat the job is putting on a coach right now, and none of what follows is a forecast that anyone gets fired. It is a way to read the seat honestly.
We will run all five tells on the same case: Lance Leipold at Kansas, who sits at No. 3 on our 2026 board. Here is how to do it yourself.
Tell 1: Throw out the record and read the point differential
The win-loss line is the least useful number on the page.
A coin-flip team can finish 5-7 with average underlying numbers, and a lucky team can finish 8-4 while getting outplayed. The two numbers that actually predict next year are point differential and SRS, an opponent-adjusted rating you can find on any team’s Sports Reference page. If the margin sits near zero and the SRS is low single digits, there is no contender hiding under the record and no collapse waiting either.
Kansas was plus 1.3 points a game with a 2.88 SRS in 2025. Those are the vitals of a thoroughly average team, which means the record is roughly honest and no kind bounce is buried in it.
Tell 2: Count the one-score games
This is the number that decides most bounce-back bets.
Games settled by eight points or fewer are close to coin flips, and they regress hard from one year to the next. A team that lost a pile of them is a decent bet to win a few next season without changing a thing, and a team that won a pile is due to give some back. Walk the schedule and tally the one-score finishes and who came out on top.
Kansas went 1-4 in winnable Power Four games and led in the fourth quarter of four of its seven losses. That is a finishing problem, and finishing problems in close games are the most likely thing on this list to correct on their own, which is the single strongest reason for Kansas optimism.
Tell 3: Find the side of the ball nobody fixed
Most struggling teams are lopsided, and the trick is naming the unit that is actually sinking them.
Compare scoring offense to scoring defense, then dig one layer down to yards per play on each side. Points allowed tends to be the more stable and more telling number, so when a team keeps blowing late leads, look at the defense before you blame the offense.
Kansas has the opposite of Florida State’s problem. The offense is real and efficient, better than its historical Kansas comps in yards per play and yards per carry. The defense gives up 189 rushing yards per game at 4.9 per carry. You do not surrender fourth-quarter leads because the offense turned shy. You surrender them because you cannot get off the field.
Tell 4: Strip the cupcakes out of the schedule
A shiny record or scoring margin is often two blowouts against overmatched teams in costume.
Pull the game log, remove the FCS opponent and any clear buy game, and recompute the record and the margin against everyone with a pulse. If the team padded its résumé on tune-ups, this is where it shows. If it did not, the record is telling you the truth.
Kansas bought an FCS guarantee game every fall and beat Wagner 46-7 right on schedule, and still missed a bowl. When the cupcakes cannot buy you a sixth win, the record is honest, not inflated.
Tell 5: Watch what the staff repaired in the offseason
The offseason tells you the coach’s own diagnosis, and whether he agrees with yours.
Look at the coordinator hires and the transfer portal class, and ask one question: which unit got the resources? If a staff spent the winter upgrading the thing that already worked and left the real problem alone, next season tends to rhyme with the last one.
Kansas brought coordinator Andy Kotelnicki back to sharpen an offense that was never the problem, while the defense that surrenders 31 points a game got no equivalent rescue. Fixing the symptom and leaving the disease is a tell, and it is the one that keeps Leipold at No. 3.
Run the five on Kansas, and here is the verdict
Add them up, and the seat reads clearly.
The underlying numbers say average, the close-game math says a rebound is possible, the defense says the problem is real and unaddressed, the schedule says the record is honest, and the offseason says the staff fixed the wrong side. That is a Trend, and it is hardening. It is not structural yet, because the offense is real and coin flips regress toward even, and it is not a firing call, because this is a pressure reading. Win a handful of tight ones in 2026, and it will be a blip that fixes itself. Lose them again, and the slide becomes the address.
That is the whole method, run start to finish on one coach.
Want to run it on your own team? Our free Coach Evaluation Scorecard walks you through seven categories on a 1-to-5 scale, 35 points in all, so you can score any coach’s seat the way we do. [LINK]
Want the complete case on Leipold? The full Diagnosis, with the workbook comparison matrix against Mark Mangino and Matt Campbell, and The Market Read on where the betting line disagrees with the hype, is here. [LINK]
