LAWRENCE
The call came in on Christmas Day 2007, nearly a week before the Kansas football program would lift the Orange Bowl trophy on a chilly night in South Florida. When David Beaty picked up the phone, he was a second-year assistant at Rice, just two years removed from his days as the head coach at MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas.
Beaty had dreams, of course, career aspirations that far exceeded being a college position coach. But it’s fair to say, as he reached for the phone on that day in 2007, the dreams did not include Kansas.