The 2023 football season was one to forget for Kent State, like so many others have been in the last several decades. Faced with the most attrition in the country, then first year Kent State Head Coach Kenni Burns called it “Year Zero.” Athletic Director Randale Richmond acknowledged it as well, giving Burns a one year contract extension. It was a year that saw KSU non-competitive in most games, and a return to not only the cellar of the Mid-American Conference, but also all of FBS.
Fans, players and coaches alike don’t want to experience that again. So Burns and his staff went to work after the season ended.
“The season ended and basically what I did as a head coach was I went to work,” Burns told KSU radio voice Rob Polinsky at MAC Football Media Day July 19. “There’s no time worrying about what just happened. What can we learn from it, where are you at as a program and how do we get better. And after I took the Christmas break to study all the games that we played, I watched almost every practice that we were in and there was three things that really stood out to me that I said I have to find a way to attack.”
Kent State made several changes on the coaching staff, and saw some players hit the portal, while welcoming in newcomers. All of this was to find the right mix that was “all in”, the offseason mantra of the Flashes.
“The first thing was alignment,” Burns said. “I said I have to get these guys to be all in on Kent GRIT because there’s too many lockerroom lawyers, there’s too many coaches going another direction. How do we get everyone aligned in the same direction? So when the guys came back after their winter break, I said guys if you’re going to stay here, you gotta put two feet in, there’s no more second guessing. If you can’t do that, guys that are returning, you didn’t buy this, you didn’t buy Kent grit, I’ll help you find a new home. But if you’re going to stay here we gotta work in the right direction and then I added the coaches that we talked about and I really feel like alignment was really big, so our off-season mantra was “All In’. You gotta be all into everything that we’re doing and I think the guys have taken it and ran with it.”
The next thing Burns addressed was the size and strength component of the group. Far too many times Kent State simply wasn’t physical enough to combat whatever talent and resource gap they are facing against their MAC peers. The Flashes didn’t have the look of a team that wants to play the style Burns wants them to.
“The second thing that I saw that I had to address was transforming our bodies,” Burns remarked. “I didn’t think we looked like a Championship MAC caliber team, so I knew we needed to get bigger, faster, stronger. So I went and hired a new strength coach by the name of Charles Friday, who I’m really familiar with and he’s done a great job getting these guys bigger, faster, stronger. If you ask our players, they’ll tell you this is the hardest summer they’ve ever been a part of, which is good for them.”
The third part is something that long suffering KSU football fans have seen for a while. Something bad happens in a game and it’s the “here we go again” mentality that has plagued the program for years.
“The last thing we really kind of addressed as a coaching staff is mental and emotional development. I didn’t think we handled discomfort well. I think when you look at Kent State the past 10 to 15 years whenever they’ve been in discomfort in games, discomfort in life, they’ve struggled with it so we talked about how can we make our team more mentally tougher and then playing with emotion, not playing emotional, and we did some things that are really cool with team building, with challenging them to rely on each other this offseason to really help that to so those were the three areas that I saw that I knew I had to address and i think we’re moving in the right direction in those areas.”
Whether Kent State has improved or not on the scoreboard, in the standings or in the ‘eye test’ of being more competitive in games, remains to be seen. There are a lot of ways to measure improvement and success, but at the Division I level in college football, winning is at the top. The Flashes and their staff feel like they are working towards the issues from last year, and look to take a step forward in 2024.