MORGANTOWN — Saturday’s matchup between Kansas and West Virginia will be nearly a year to the day when Jayhawks quarterback Jalon Daniels suffered the back injury that ended his 2023 season.
Daniels is healthy and starting for KU this season, but the 2023 Big 12 preseason offensive player of the year does not look like the player he once was as the Jayhawks are off to a disappointing 1-2 start.
Daniels is completing just 55% of his passes, his worst mark since 2020, and has already set a new career high with six interceptions. His previous career high for a season was just four.
Before Saturday (noon, ESPN2), the last time Daniels and the Jawhawks were in Morgantown, he threw for 219 yards and three touchdowns and ran for 85 yards as KU won 55-42 in overtime on Sept. 10, 2022.
“He’s a really good player and I hate that he’s missed all that time,” WVU coach Neal Brown said. “He was electric (last year) and he was electric when we played him (in 2022). He put on a show the last time he was here.”
Despite Daniels’s struggles to start the season, West Virginia’s coaches still believe he’s as dangerous as he’s ever been.
“Very simply to me it just looks like a little bit of rust,” WVU defensive coordinator Jordan Lesley said. “I know first-hand how good of a player he is. He is dynamic, he’s a game-changer with his legs and his arm.”
Kansas has a new offensive coordinator this season, bringing over Jeff Grimes from Baylor to replace Andy Kotelnicki, who went to Penn State. The Jayhawks are averaging under 20 points over their last two games, losses to Illinois and UNLV.
“Jalon has been outstanding in attitude, effort, coachability and all of those things,” KU coach Lance Leipold said. “There’s some good things out there, there are moments, but the big thing on offense is we have not responded well when something hasn’t gone right.”
A point of concern for WVU is that Daniels’s biggest strengths — scrambling and throwing deep — match up with the Mountaineers’ biggest weaknesses on defense.
“He’s probably pretty excited,” Brown joked.
Those weaknesses cost WVU big in last week’s heartbreaking loss to Pitt. Quarterback Eli Holstein’s 17-yard scramble with less than a minute to play set up the Panthers’ game-winning touchdown three plays later.
The Mountaineers did get good pressure on Holstein, sacking him five times, but they struggled to consistently bring him down as he escaped for a total of 59 rushing yards.
“If we can get the same type of pressure that we did against Pitt, you feel good about it,” Brown said. “We’ve just got to get the guy down. We probably missed five other sacks where we had him in our hands.”
Daniels hasn’t been running as much this season but is still averaging 4.4 yards per carry.
“That’s going to be even more of a scrambling quarterback than what Holstein was,” said WVU defensive lineman TJ Jackson, who had four tackles for loss and 1.5 sacks against Pitt. “That’s a huge emphasis this week…We’ve got to stay disciplined on reading what he’s going to do. It’s going to be a tough battle, it’s going to be a chess game.”
