Mangino takes Kansas to unimaginable heights

MIAMI -- Mark Mangino had no illusions about the depths to which football had fallen at Kansas when he took the coaching job before the 2002 season.

The Jayhawks hadn’t played in a bowl game since 1995, hadn’t cracked the Associated Press poll since early in the 1996 season and hadn’t been coming close to filling 51,000-seat Memorial Stadium in Lawrence.

They couldn’t recruit blue-chip athletes, their training facilities were outdated, and they had little hope of turning any of that around.

“It’s a program that’s had a tough century,” Mangino said, not entirely joking.

It all seemed so hopeless that Mangino, voted the top assistant coach in college football in 2000 for his work as the assistant head coach, offensive coordinator and offensive line coach during Oklahoma’s national title run, initially turned down the chance to rebuild Kansas’ program.

Upon reflection, he said no again. And again.

Finally, he decided that facing the impossible would be easier than facing himself 10 or 15 years later if he shied away from this monumental challenge.

“The prevailing thought when I came here was that we’re not very good, I don’t think we’ll ever be very good,” Mangino said. “You know, the football team is something to do until we get our basketball season started.”

Mangino’s team has become much more than something to fill time.

The 11-1 Jayhawks, eighth in the Bowl Championship Series standings, tonight will play the No. 3 Virginia Tech Hokies in the Orange Bowl, Kansas’ BCS bowl debut. When Mangino leads his team onto the field at Dolphin Stadium, he will become the first Kansas coach to take a team to more than two bowl games, following appearances in the 2003 Tangerine Bowl in Orlando, Fla., and the 2005 Fort Worth Bowl.

Plain-spoken and lacking in pretension, Mangino is the antithesis of the single-minded coaches who see life as a metaphor for football instead of the other way around.

He grew up in a working-class neighborhood in the western Pennsylvania town of New Castle, where he played football and baseball. He worked as a high school coach and emergency first responder on the Pennsylvania Turnpike before beginning a gradual climb up the coaching ladder, from high school to a low assistant at Kansas State, to more responsibility at Oklahoma and then to the top job at Kansas.

Many of his childhood friends planned to be here today. Some are successful lawyers and businessmen but consider him the hometown kid who made it big. He doesn’t get it, even though he was voted the coach of the year by the Associated Press and an alphabet soup of other organizations this season.

“Society’s a little screwed up in that way,” he said.

“My grandfather, he had a job. He worked with a pick and shovel for 40 years on the Pennsylvania Railroad. That’s a job. This? This is fun.”

During his final pre-bowl news conference Wednesday, while offering the usual platitudes about how happy he was to be here, Mangino made a point of recognizing that being able to say he had brought Kansas to the Orange Bowl was a truly exciting moment.

“When I first got the job at Kansas if I said that to somebody they’d laugh at me,” he said. “And guys would have shown up with two real big nets and a straitjacket because nobody ever thought that this would happen in their lifetime.”

Here they are, though, on the big stage and ready for their close-up after adopting Mangino’s mantra that they could be as good as their work ethic would allow.

His first team was 2-10 and played its final home game in front of only 27,500. His 2006 team was 6-6.

His 2007 team had four All-Big 12 Conference first-team players, including first-team All-American offensive tackle Anthony Collins and Big 12 defensive lineman of the year James McClinton. Sophomore quarterback Todd Reesing, whose 5-foot-11 frame scared off most teams, threw for 3,259 yards and 32 touchdowns and had only six passes intercepted.

Attendance boomed to an average of nearly 47,000, boosted by a school-record 51,910 for a 76-39 victory over Nebraska on Nov. 3.

Fundraising accelerated for a new training and office complex next to the stadium, due to open this summer. Mangino can recruit in Texas and Florida and Ohio and win some good prospects.

Not to spoil this feel-good story with a dose of reality, but it must be acknowledged that the Jayhawks’ schedule this season was soft. Almost comically so.

They didn’t play Oklahoma or Texas. They played their first four games at home, against Central Michigan, Southeastern Louisiana, Toledo and Florida International, and won by a cumulative 214-23.

They played only two ranked teams, defeating then-No. 24 Kansas State, 30-24, at Manhattan on Oct. 6 and losing to No. 3 Missouri, 36-28, at Kansas City, Mo., in their season finale.

Mangino disputed the notion that Kansas padded its record during a down year for the Big 12 and offered no apologies for crafting a non-conference schedule designed to build players’ confidence early in the season.

“I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Nobody in December remembers who you played in September,” he said. “It’s what your win-loss record is. And apparently our strategy must have worked. We’re here at the Orange Bowl today.”

Without a straitjacket in sight.

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Helene Elliott can be reached at helene.elliott@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Elliott, go to latimes.com/elliott.