With Michael Cummings still rehabbing from a spring game knee injury, David Beaty has been searching for one of KU’s healthy quarterbacks to step up and take the reigns.

After several weeks of practice, the first-year KU head coach decided to name Montell Cozart the starter for the season opener on September 5 against South Dakota State.

A junior, Cozart transferred from Dodge City Community College and played in five games in 2014. After beating out Deondre Ford for the starting spot, Beaty now says all Cozart has to do it go out and produce.

Easier said than done.

Kansas has struggled on the offensive side of the ball, essentially since the departure of Todd Reesing and his highly ranked, uptempo offenses during the Orange Bowl and Insight.com Bowl runs.

The Jayhawks have gone through several coaches, and gone through seemingly twice as many QB’s during that span.

Two high school All-American and highly ranked QB’s–Jake Heaps and Dayne Crist–busted at KU under Charlie Wise, mostly because the overall unit lacked the talent (and potentially the coaching) to ever materialize into a viable Big 12 offense.

With David Beaty back at Kansas, and proud to be the coach of the Jayhawks, the offense will see the uptempo style back in action and at least from an outside perspective, the program appears to have new life between players and coaches, something which was widely known to be an issue under both Turner Gill and Charlie Wise.

For Cozart, making the simple plays while sprinkling in dynamic ones as well is going to be the key for the Jayhawks. For five consecutive years, Kansas has benched its starting QB mid-season. No program will experience the desired success with that type of resume.

With many of the Big 12 teams emerging as consistent national powers and FBS Playoff contenders, Kansas needs to vault its program from the bottom of the 10-team conference. In fact, points given to KU by coaches and media in preseason Big 12 polls have the Jayhawks uncomfortably in last place.

For a program with history, and recent history at that, continuously losing and lacking the competitiveness to win conference games simply won’t sit well in a landscape of college sports dominated by the revenue of football.

KU Athletics has been lucky that the men’s basketball program has more than made up for the lack of overall revenue generate on the gridiron. At some point, however, Athletic Director Sheahon Zenger needs to see his football team make significant strides.

Fans will have their chance to see what progress the program has made during its first offseason with Beaty and the helm, September 5 against South Dakota State. Worst-case and damning to the program would obviously be a loss, but at this point, as long as the Jayhawks come away with a win, the program is headed in the right direction.

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