Kansas defensive linemen Caleb Taylor, right, and Malcolm Lee celebrate after making a play in the Week 1 win over South Dakota on Sept. 3, 2021, at David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium.
The Kansas football team had recaptured the momentum and a 10-point lead Saturday with Jason Bean’s 80-yard bomb to Lawrence Arnold, but it wasn’t out of the woods yet.
Iowa State promptly marched into the KU red zone thanks to a pass interference penalty and a deep pass. The Cyclones only stalled when Caleb Taylor got involved.
The Jayhawks’ reserve defensive tackle, thrust into extended duty on the line with KU down Devin Phillips and Tommy Dunn Jr., bounced off one block from ISU center Jim Bonifas on a third-and-9 pass, then rounded right guard Brendan Black, the first true freshman to start on the line for the Cyclones in 15 years.
Taylor reached out his right arm to snag ISU quarterback Rocco Becht as he attempted to scramble, bringing him down at the line of scrimmage to halt the drive and force a field goal attempt. Taylor also had half a sack earlier in the game and finished with three total tackles.
It was just the seventh game in the last two seasons in which the junior from St. Louis had recorded a stat, after he started four on the line in 2021. It was also, to hear defensive coordinator Brian Borland tell it, his best throughout that period.
“There’s a couple plays that come to my mind where (he did) just like what you’d want, coming off the ball and knocking an offensive lineman back and protecting his gap and shedding a block and getting to the ball, making tackles,” Borland said.
“I think he certainly over the last month or so has really improved his day-to-day practice, and what he’s doing, and so it’s good to see when you get a chance to really do it in a game, that that stuff comes to fruition too.”
It’s been a long road back to significant action for Taylor, and some of the primary obstacles on that road, he said Wednesday, have been nutritional. In particular, the defensive tackle has struggled to cultivate the weight needed to play inside as a Big 12 Conference defensive tackle. As the Journal-World previously reported, he played in early 2021 — when, in fact, he was getting the most playing time — undersized for his position at 258 pounds. He had made it to nearly 300 by the spring of 2022 but, he said, “would always lose it over the course of the season.”
Now, Taylor, who is listed at 315 this year, says it took him “a couple years just to figure that part out, how to maintain.”
“This is the first year where I really didn’t lose any of my weight, any of the progress that I made in the offseason,” he said.
Taylor saw his greatest playing time in Lance Leipold’s first year, but he was actually a Les Miles recruit who committed in 2019 as a three-star defensive end and played a bit as a freshman the following year.
He said the continuity of having nutritionist Stacey Potter in place the entire time he’s been at KU — she too predates Leipold’s staff and watched him “pretty much make the same mistakes over and over again” — has helped him build up his body.
“She’s been here longer than pretty much anyone else in the building,” Taylor said.
The nutritional staff helped him overcome his initial struggles by enacting regular check-ins and goals set for each nutritional category, total calories and the like.
“It took a while, obviously, for me to be able to figure that out,” he said, “but now that I have, I feel like I have a pretty good hold on it.”
While he worked to make progress, Taylor frequently had his name buried on the depth chart. Early this season, he found himself sharing a spot with transfer Gage Keys as the backup to Phillips, as part of the Jayhawks’ wide-ranging six-man rotation at the position. He said that in the past it was challenging for him to stay ready while put in such a position, but that he matured to a point that he was able to reckon with it.
“Sometimes I’m not a person that has to learn the hard way, but with a situation like that, I had to learn the hard way,” Taylor said. “So just in my experiences of past years of high school, here, just being an athlete in general, I just had that situation similar to that happen before, but I just wanted this one to be different.”
All the while, he was waiting for his preparation to pay off, as it did when he and his No. 53 jersey — relatively unfamiliar at this point in the year — seemed to be around the ball up in big spots in Ames last weekend.
“I just stayed the course, continued having faith that it would come and that it would come to the surface, and thankfully it did,” Taylor said. “I’m glad that it did and I’m glad that I’ll get more opportunities going forward because of that.”
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110281Caleb Taylor worked through nutritional, preparational challenges to stick in DT rotation
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