LAWRENCE — As Dan Fitzgerald reflected Monday on his team’s recent sweep of Kansas State, his mind took him to a handful of different places.

Fitzgerald, Kansas baseball’s head coach, referenced how significant that was because of the factors that make KSU a dangerous opponent. He highlighted how meaningful it is to have an in-state rivalry between two Big 12 Conference programs that are playing well.

As he thought about how a head coach views things sometimes from 30,000 feet, he mused that this sweep outlined the momentum his program has.

On ground level, though, Fitzgerald pivoted to talking about the difference between a team working the game of baseball and just playing it. He thinks great teams just play, and noted something they talk about is that no one is going to enjoy it more than they are.

And while he was adamant he hasn’t seriously studied all the factors that go into being safe from the NCAA tournament bubble or not just yet, KU is poised to make its first NCAA regional since 2014 as long as the Jayhawks continue to play with a free mind.

“I think right now we’ve taken care of business, we’re competing at a high level, we’re in the conversation competing for a Big 12 championship, which puts us way inside the field,” Fitzgerald said.

“Now, we’ve got a ton of baseball to go and that can swing greatly. That can swing into hosting and being a national seed, and it can swing into not being in the tournament at all. So, I think our time is better focused on just playing baseball. But, yeah, if the season ended today, we’d certainly — we’d be in the NCAA tournament.”

The day after Fitzgerald said that, Kansas won on the road at Nebraska in non-conference play to improve its record to 32-10 overall and 12-6 against the Big 12 this season. It improved the Jayhawks’ winning streak at the time to five, ahead of this weekend’s road series at Big 12-foe Utah.

Where that level of momentum will be when KU returns to Lawrence is unclear, but even if there’s a setback in this trip, the team’s shown multiple times this year it can be counted upon to bounce back.

Travis Goff, Kansas’ athletic director and vice chancellor, mentioned before the start of the Kansas State series that conversations with Fitzgerald during the fall started to give him the idea that a season like this would be possible. Fitzgerald, in year three, wasn’t minimizing expectations and talked about how the team’s culture was ahead of where he thought it’d be with so many newcomers.

As fall turned into spring, it wasn’t just high-profile names like Dominic Voegele, Brady Ballinger, and Brady Counsell coming up, and the group’s depth became more and more clear.

The way Fitzgerald explained it, the level of care the players possessed and their collective self-starter mentality stood out to him during the fall. As they looked at the starting rotation, it became clear Cooper Moore could give them another high-level guy alongside Voegele. Not only did the group as a whole have toughness and grit, but it also seemed to be better defensively and more athletic.

Goff, who referred to a Big 12 series win at home against Baylor earlier this spring as a statement for the team, said when they hired Fitzgerald, they didn’t spend a ton of time talking about exactly what the composition of the roster would be each year. Goff saw someone in Fitzgerald who could put it all together in different ways, and someone who wanted to get a feel for what the best path forward at KU would be once he experienced it for himself. That trust, though, doesn’t mean the success of this 2025 squad comes without any hint of surprise.

“Coming off of last year, we lost so many great players and that whole batch to professional baseball, I never fathomed that we’d be in a position to do what that team and that program is doing this year,” Goff said.

“I knew they’d get great pieces. I knew they’d fill spots. I knew they had some nice young guys in the program. But I’d be lying if I told you, after all the loss from last year, we’d be even close to the position we’re in at this point.”

What point Kansas will be at in a little less than a month, when the Big 12 tournament begins, will be determined in time. What seems set to remain constant, though, is that free mind the Jayhawks have played with that Fitzgerald also notices in the natural engagement the players have with the game in the dugout. Fitzgerald thinks the approach the coaching staff has, of emphasizing they are in their players' corners, helps everyone on the field not look over their shoulders to see if he’s mad if something bad happens.

Regardless of what happens next, Goff highlighted it’s just a team that’s fun to watch. One-through-nine he sees threats in the lineup, and not just because of how much power that lineup has. There’s also a collective buy-in that shows up when players who aren’t regular starters have their moments and are ready to make a difference.

“I just think you see something special that for, whether it be baseball or any sport, is not a given by any stretch of the imagination,” Goff said. “That translates to how you feel watching it, either on TV or in person.”

Jordan Guskey covers University of Kansas Athletics at The Topeka Capital-Journal. He was the 2022 National Sports Media Association’s sportswriter of the year for the state of Kansas. Contact him at [email protected] or on Twitter at @JordanGuskey.