When Shane Bumgardner lost out on a starting job to fellow transfer center Bryce Foster, he didn’t immediately have a clear-cut role on the 2024 Kansas football team.
But offensive coordinator Jeff Grimes and offensive line coach Daryl Agpalsa clearly made good on their preseason allusions to the prospect of cross-training Bumgardner on the interior line, because after sitting out KU’s previous two games, at West Virginia he rotated in for starter Kobe Baynes and ended up playing 54 offensive snaps at right guard, according to Pro Football Focus.
For comparison, that’s as many as Devin Neal played at running back.
“I thought he stepped in and played like a guy who’s played football before,” Grimes said of Bumgardner. “The moment wasn’t too big for him, and (he) was a guy who stepped in the moment when we needed it.”
Bumgardner apparently did a good job projecting confidence, because to hear his teammate Foster tell it, he was suppressing plenty of anxiety when he first entered the game.
“I think two plays after he came in, there was an injury timeout for someone on the other team,” Foster recalled. “And we were jogging over to the sideline together, and he was like ‘Dude, I was so nervous, I felt like a little kid, I was about to pee my pants.’ It was really funny. But those two plays were right behind us and got pretty good (yardage), I think it was like four yards, five yards a pop, and so that was really good.”
Foster, for his part, added that he had plenty of confidence in Bumgardner’s intelligence and his ability to attend to his responsibilities on the O-line.
Coaches previously stated that Bumgardner, who came over from Division II Tiffin in the spring, had been banged up during a portion of fall camp about when the late-summer Texas A&M transfer Foster began to settle into his new role, and that played a role in Foster eventually seizing the starting job.
Head coach Lance Leipold said on Monday, though, that Bumgardner “had really strung together a few good weeks of practice” to get himself on the field. And Leipold added that the starter Baynes didn’t play his best at West Virginia, either.
Rotating guards is not necessarily new for the Jayhawks, who had Baynes and Ar’maj Reed-Adams split time last season.
This year, though, a move like introducing Bumgardner — as well as Nolan Gorczyca, who subbed in occasionally for Logan Brown at right tackle — could hold greater significance. Bumgardner could continue to play a key role if the staff determines that rotating offensive linemen will allow the offense as a whole to produce more consistent results late in games.
“Hopefully that can make that offensive line, our offense better,” Leipold said, “if we do maybe substitute a few guys and we’re fresher in the fourth quarter.”
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