The Kansas football team was back on the practice field in full on Tuesday morning, running through the first of 15 spring practices during the next month.
With the sun shining bright and a chill in the air, many of the same faces you saw on last year's 9-4 team that won the Guaranteed Rate Bowl were back, but the talk among them was about maintaining the hunger that delivered that bowl win in the first place.
KU coach Lance Leipold and strength coach Matt Gildersleeve said that's where this season has to start, with the Jayhawks striving to out-perform their accomplishments from a year ago. And with so many veterans returning, the consensus of opinion is that won't be hard to do.
Gildersleeve said in all of his years doing this he has never seen a team so locked in during the 8-week offseason conditioning program. In fact, there were days he had to tell the Jayhawks to ease up and pull back, going as far as to joke that he even considered hiding the weights at one point.
"We all have the same goal of 'I want to be great,'" senior receiver Luke Grimm told R1S1 Sports on Tuesday. "When we came to spring ball, it was like, 'Get ready because it's gonna be a spring ball. It's not gonna be a light practice; you're not gonna fly through it. You're gonna gut this out and you're gonna have fun gutting in out."
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