Leipold evaluates Jalon Daniels, the defense after UNLV loss

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Published Sep 13, 2024

Leipold evaluates Jalon Daniels, the defense after UNLV loss

Sam Winton • JayhawkSlant

Staff Writer

@sam_winton2

Kansas suffered another disappointing loss on Friday night, this time at the hands of UNLV 23-20. Lance Leipold spoke to the media following the game, breaking down a shaky performance from Jalon Daniels, a generally strong defensive performance, and the offensive struggles in the second half.

Leipold believes in Jalon Daniels, needs to find ways to get his confidence up

Daniels has now thrown six interceptions in the first three games of the season. Leipold said he can’t exactly pinpoint what is causing the interceptions, but it is an issue that needs to be solved.

“I’m sure the first interception he didn’t see the guy and what’s causing that right now,” Leipold said. “I’m not exactly positive at this moment because I think each play of course is separate, but I don’t know if it’s visual or if he’s not seeing something on the field on the backside. That’s something we need to talk about this weekend.”

Leipold said that he thought Daniels’ throws were low for most of the night and called the situation with Daniels’ confidence “fragile.” However, Leipold called Daniels a competitive guy and is not worried about him rebounding from these struggles.

“He keeps fighting and competing and like I say, I’ll believe in Jalon Daniels and he’ll continue to get better,” Leipold said.

Daniels hasn’t played a lot of live football over the past two years, missing a lot of time with injury. Leipold doesn’t think that can be the source of the problems because he’s still seen Daniels make impressive plays.

“There’s times that you see him making throws that have been every bit as good, if not better than he’s ever made before, and then there’s times when it’s not,” Leipold said. “But it’s just everybody can do better. Everybody. And like I said, it starts with the head coach and I need to do better.”

Defense plays pretty well, again can’t make enough plays

Kansas’ defense kept the Jayhawks in the game while the offense was struggling. The defense was especially stonewalled in the red zone, forcing UNLV to take four field goals, where the Rebels made three.

Outside of Matthew Sluka, Kansas bottled up the run game and when it forced Sluka to throw, it was also able to make stops. Overall, Leipold said the defense played well statistically. He also said that the defensive line played with good effort.

“Today's college football world, you're holding people under 300 yards, I think you're doing a decent job,” Leipold said. “I don't think we contained the quarterback quite like we had hoped. You know, their all-American receiver [Ricky White] didn't, you know, wasn't a huge factor.”

However, similar to last week’s game against Illinois, UNLV was able to kill a lot of clock on its last drive and take the lead with a touchdown. There were a multitude of ways the Jayhawks could have gotten off the field - a near-interception, a fumble that six Jayhawks surrounded but couldn’t pick up, and committing penalties on crucial downs.

“But again, as a team, we just did not make enough plays,” Leipold said.

Offense struggles to close first half and for much of the second half

In similar fashion to Illinois, Kansas’ two-minute drill to end the first half was disastrous. Daniels threw an interception that was returned into Kansas territory, where UNLV ended up scoring a touchdown to cut the lead to 17-13.

“We're going to get the ball with barely, with just under two minutes and we're going to go because we're playing well,” Leipold said. “And so, yeah, so mindset hadn't changed. We felt were in a good position. We were going to stay aggressive.”

To start the second half, Kansas’ offense struggled to get going. The run game started to get bottled up, the offense was backed up, and Daniels wasn’t at a spot where he could be relied on in the passing game.

“I thought early in [the] second half they made a few adjustments,” Leipold said. “We didn't respond. I thought we had really good movement [in] the first half and it wasn't happened as much second half, you know, we throw a couple interceptions right now and right now it's become a fragile situation [Daniels’] confidence is in… and then I think we became a little predictable there with it then, especially, like I said, in those backed up situations.”