Two consecutive 5-7 seasons for head coach Lance Leipold's team is not at all what Kansas football fans expected, with some of their better rosters in recent memory, not living up to the bill. And with a fresh set of players heading into the 2026 season, the Jayhawks hope to find themselves higher up in the Big 12 standings when it's all said and done.
This year presents a new challenge, and one that KU might have welcomed a bit sooner, which is a change at quarterback. Six-year man Jalon Daniels played his last down of football at KU last year and signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after going undrafted in the NFL Draft.
Daniels' first four years at Kansas saw him appear in 25 games, where his on-and-off starting production ranged from horrendous to pretty good, his best campaign coming in 2022, when he played in nine games, and had a TD: INT ratio of 18:4 on over 2,000 passing yards and seven more scores on the ground. He became the entrenched starter for 2024 and '25, but never really lived up to the hype set before him.
The Jayhawks will have to sort through a two-man battle for the starting spot
With Daniels now out of the picture, the onus is now on coach Leipold and his offensive staff to find the pick the right guy to lead the Jayhawks. Right now, it's clear that there is a two-man battle brewing for the starting spot between redshirt junior Cole Ballard and redshirt sophomore Isaiah Marshall.
Neither one of them was highly-touted coming out of high school, Ballard being a two-star recruit and Marshall a three-star. At 6'2", 210 lbs, Ballard poses more of a threat in the pocket as a guy who can scan the field effectively, but can also gash opposing defenses with his legs when he gets going.
Marshall is a guy who relies on his speed and elusiveness in the pocket at just 6'0", but is built at 215 lbs. Their career numbers slated as Daniels' backups certainly aren't anything to ride home about, but Ballard did get the nod as the first guy up whenever Daniels would have to be subbed off the field.
Part of that may be because Marshall, in 2025, was the new kid on the block, but that's not the case anymore. Over his 65 career pass attempts with the Hawks, Ballard has completed a poor 54.7% of them for 445 yards, 3 TDs, and 4 Ints. He's also added over 200 yards on the ground.
Marshall was used as more of a gadget guy last year, brought in to give the Jayhawks a different look. He ran the ball five times as much as he passed it at 15 to three, but averaged an impressive 10.7 yards per carry and completed all three attempts.
There's not much to go off of from what we've seen on the field so far, and camp will give us a better understanding of where KU's current QB competition stands. And while we can be excited for some fresh blood at signal-caller, it's very possible that midway through the season, we find ourselves reminiscing on how Jalon Daniels would have made the play Ballard or Marshall could not.
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