While watching Kansas quarterback Jalon Daniels during spring practices, you really can’t tell that he missed time with a significant shoulder injury last season.
He looks strong, confident, mobile and accurate.
He feels good, too.
“I’m just going out there to take all the reps that they give me,” Daniels said after spring practice No. 11 on a warm Thursday morning. “My amount of reps is on the coaches and I trust that they’re going to be able to give me the amount of reps that I need to be able to prepare myself.”
That’s not to say they haven’t kept a close eye on the quarterback’s condition, both in terms of how he looks and how he responds to the workload he’s given and how his right shoulder feels before, during and after practices.
But the senior-to-be has been freed up, mentally, to think less about what happened in the past and more about what he’s doing to prepare for the future. Daniels said he is doing more in practice today than he was at the start of spring practices, and added that he feels as good as ever.
The comfortable pace, his closely tracked movements and the understanding that his recovery remains a work in progress has left Daniels feeling great about his future and hardly thinking about the shoulder at all.
“I wouldn’t say that we stopped monitoring it because we’re going to keep on monitoring it,” he said. “It’s still my throwing arm, so we’re definitely keeping in contact with the trainers and leaving everything up to the coaches and trainers.”
That plan and Daniels’ work this spring has been a welcomed sight for the KU QB and the guys he throws to.
“He’s full-go,” wideout Luke Grimm said Thursday. “Like nothing ever happened.”
Despite adding 11 or so pounds of muscle to his frame, Kansas wide receiver Luke Grimm has reached his top speed of just under 21 miles per hour four or five times during the past few weeks.
And he’s not the only one running like that. Grimm said Thursday that 20-30 players broke their top speeds in recent weeks.
While that has shown up at different times on the field during practice and scrimmages, the mental part of it has been the biggest gain.
“I mean, it’s progression,” said Daniels, who Grimm said was another Jayhawk who recently broke the 21 mph mark. “The numbers aren’t going to lie to us. It shows that we keep progressing as players and not only as players but as a team, as a program.”
Grimm said his increased speed has helped him embrace the fact that his bigger frame will not limit him in any way when he’s running routes. In fact, he believes it will make him both faster and tougher to take down.
“It just helps me to realize that all the hard work I’m putting in in the weight room is showing up,” he said.
Asked Thursday how he felt when he first saw the mammoth size of new KU offensive linemen transfers Logan Brown (6-foot-6, 320 pounds) and Spencer Lovell (6-6, 330), Daniels needed just one word to answer.
“Protected,” he said with a laugh.
The Kansas quarterback was so taken aback by Lovell’s physical presence that he was not even sure who he was when he first saw him.
“I was like, ‘Oh, you’re not a coach. OK,'” Daniels joked of the fifth-year senior from Cal. “(I thought), ‘Dang. You coming here?”