Lindenwood head coach Jed Stugart and Lance Leipold have been familiar with each other for a long time. Stugart said during his press conference he has been following Leipold’s career since he was at Nebraska-Omaha.

The last three years Leipold and his staff have attended the mega camp at Lindenwood. Leipold and Stugart talked about playing a game and that is one reason they will face each other on Thursday night.

Stugart is not surprised to see Leipold succeed at KU.

“You just look at his career and I mean, he's been a great coach,” Stugart said of Leipold. “I knew two years ago when Kansas on per se wasn't a real powerful program, they were struggling. I knew it would not take long. When you look at Coach Leipold’s track record of how he's built, winning teams, winning cultures, I knew it wouldn't take long for that to happen here. They're a really good football team.”

One of the unknowns for Lindenwood is predicting what the Jayhawks will do on offense. With Jeff Grimes taking over as the offensive coordinator, they are looking at his past stops and what the Jayhawks have used.

“With any first week games, you've got to kind of get an idea of what that offensive coordinator is like from where he came from,” Stugart said. “And then you got to kind of watch personnel from their games last year because, you know, they're, they are doing a lot of similar things.

He continued: “With Coach Grimes being the new offensive coordinator to what they did last year, we feel kind of watching some Baylor and watching this, for all of us coaches, you go into a first game, there's new offenses, there's new defense, and you don't have a lot of tendencies to go off of.”

They have studied film on Jalon Daniels and know they have to play solid fundamentally.

“You got to try to just really understand personnel, how they play, how the quarterback plays, and then it comes down to playing football,” he said. “You’ve got to be gap sound, you got to play good coverage. Your coverage has got to be there things because it all comes back down to football.”

Lindenwood enters the game as a heavy underdog and Stugart believes they have to fall back on what they learned in camp. There is not a lot of coach speak he can give his team to get ready for their first meeting against an FBS opponent.

“You can't give just rah-rah speeches all summer and all fall camp and tell the David and Goliath stories,” Stugart said. “You gotta know, those are irrelevant. You’ve got to play. We always say, you don't really rise to the occasion. You fall back to your fundamentals, technique, those types of things, and then you recognize, okay, you know, what, you know, who am I going up against.”

Last year Lindenwood finished 3-7 but Stugart likes this team better coming out of fall camp. Injuries played a factor in his team last year, but he likes his depth going into 2024.

“I think this year we do feel like we are a deeper team,” he said. “I feel like this team's more mature than our last team. So, I've been really excited about just kind of going through fall camp, but even spring ball and our winter workouts, spring ball and then even our summer. This team feels more mature. They're handling some more of their own business that we felt like we had to kind of guide them through last year.”