LAYING A FOUNDATION

How Kansas used junior college transfers to build a top 25 program

- by JACOB RUDNER

When Dan Fitzgerald first walked into his office at the University of Kansas in June 2022, the room was mostly bare—no trophies, no glossy recruiting boards, no illusion of inherited momentum.

Just a desk and a program in pieces.

Kansas had just suffered its sixth losing season since 2010. Its roster was splintering thanks to players exiting through the transfer portal at a high rate. In the weight room, dust settled where energy should've been. Empty lockers echoed like warnings. It had been nearly a decade since the Jayhawks last reached the NCAA Tournament, and just five times in the previous 59 years had they earned that opportunity at all.

Fitzgerald, fresh off a season as recruiting coordinator at LSU, understood immediately: Tradition wasn't going to save Kansas. Neither was flash. What Kansas needed, and what it lacked, was an identity.

“We're certainly not the Yankees,” Fitzgerald said, a half-laugh catching in his throat—less humor, more acknowledgment of the truth.

At a school defined by basketball prestige and a football program on the rise, baseball sat somewhere in between—visible, but hardly prioritized. Kansas wasn’t in the NIL arms race. It didn’t have all the bells and whistles. And Fitzgerald, in his first Power Four head coaching job, wasn’t interested in pretending it did.

There would be no shortcuts. No dramatic flips of the transfer portal’s elite. If Kansas was going to rise, it would have to do so on the backs of players no one else saw coming.

“It was very clear that we weren’t going to be able to do this conventionally,” Fitzgerald said. “We had to be different.”

That clarity—equal parts warning and rallying cry—set the tone.