For Beaty, KU football is a garden that will require nurture and time (mostly time)

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Liberty Hyde Bailey was a botanist at Cornell in the 1880s, not a football coach at Kansas in the now. But you get the feeling he and David Beaty would have a lot to talk about, starting with this quote:

"A garden requires patient labor and attention," Bailey said once. "Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them."

Lombardi, it ain't. But damned if that doesn't describe Jayhawk football at present -- or at least Beaty's master plan for it -- to the letter.

"We're not by any means saying that this is going to happen overnight," Beaty said earlier this week when asked to break down his first spring session as the football coach in Lawrence, the program's fourth full-time CEO in six years. "We have (begun) from the bottom and we're building a strong foundation and we're going to take the right steps and not skip steps on the way to getting there."

KU tried the hot mid-major. It tried the veteran NFL coach with the Super Bowl rings and dreams of a quick fix. Programs that struggle to find their feet, or stay on those feet, shoot for contrasts, and the mantra along Fambrough Way now is about zen, the slow burn.

"We've got a big job right in front of us," said Beaty, the former Texas A&M assistant/recruiting coordinator who replaced Charlie Weis in December. "And it's not for us to judge (what's) behind us or in front of us. We've got to focus on where we're at with what we've got right now."

Which, to be frank, ain't much. The Jayhawks will play their first spring game under Beaty on Saturday, and the mood is generally tempered and forward-thinking -- a far cry from the POW! and ZAM! and hoopla of Weis' first steps with the program some three years earlier. Which could be because the slate is pretty well wiped clean in a literal sense as well as a figurative one: The new coach returns two starters on offense and three on defense, as well as roughly a baker's dozen who had originally come out of high school to play for Weis.

"I think our biggest challenge overall, and it really has to do with confidence, is just time," Beaty said. "Wanting to have more time."

Amen. Amen, amen, amen. On the plus side, he gets Lawrence, a basketball town where football, in the wrong hands, can be a problem. Or forgotten. Beaty was a wide receivers coach here for two years (2008-09) under Mark Mangino and co-offensive coordinator under Turner Gill, Mangino's replacement, in 2011. He won't try to make the KU community something it isn't, or try to wish away the warts. You sell the strengths, then try like mad to create new ones on top of 'em.

"(Mangino) installed an environment that works here," Beaty said. "He created a blueprint that, quite honestly, we are borrowing a lot from that, because we've seen how it worked here before, and I think that might be something that gives us an advantage to get it back there at some point.

"But we do know that it's earned, not given. And it's going to take us time to get it done."

More contrasts: Weis was (and is) an NFL guy, NFL smart but NFL aloof. For Uncle Charlie, the term "hashtag" referred to a piece of clothing that accidentally fell into his lunch. Beaty? Beaty gets kids these days, those young eyes forever locked onto their smartphones and tablets. Even if he doesn't speak their language, he has a grip on more than enough of the basics to get by.

"It's not about you as individuals, it's about us," Beaty explained. "It's about this great state. It's about the stakeholders of our program. It's about the high school coaches in our state, the high school players in our state, it's about the fans, it's about the students, it's about something more than us."

Beaty reiterated again that this is a long process to build something for the long haul, which can be a tough pitch to a hoops market trained with a hoops mindset. On the court, two studs can carry your team to an Elite Eight. On the field, two studs means you need about dozen more to be taken seriously.

Weis had his own agenda, and the NFL calendar is more akin to the college basketball one -- if you haven't righted a ship by Year 3, out come the torches. He professed an admiration for the work of K-State's Bill Snyder and a football beast built on savvy recruiting, JUCOs and an almost superhuman amount of meticulousness, toil and sweat. Weis seemingly embraced the JUCO part of that equation first and foremost, and it blew up in his face, bad apple after bad apple. A column in the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World recently broke it down in detail: Of the 51 players -- 27 from the junior college ranks -- brought in by Weis from 2012 through '13, 37 percent were out of the program before their eligibility expired.

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Uncle Charlie was brought in to restore discipline to a program that had allegedly become a public relations problem under Gill. But the strike zone always seemed to be moving, and when more of Weis' imports started bringing their own off-field baggage to Lawrence, all that Father Flanagan talk started to ring hollow.

There's a right way and a wrong way to take your lumps. The Jayhawks over the previous three falls leaned toward the latter.

"Really, there's culture every place you go to," Beaty said. "And there was a culture in place when I got here. And you know what? That culture wasn't necessarily wrong. The culture (of a program) is what you want it to be. The challenge is getting your culture installed as quickly as you can and not skipping steps along the way, and not sacrificing the long-term success of our program for the things that will happen fast.

"And we're not going to trade that. In other words, we're going to try to do things the right way, so that we can build a program that can last."

And the best gift a KU fan can give him right now is enough rope to see out the endgame, wherever that lies. These are the kind of renovations that start from the bottom up, which means the bottom line, in the short term, may not be pretty. But the stronger the roots, the grander the garden.

You can follow Sean Keeler on Twitter at @SeanKeeler or email him at seanmkeeler@gmail.com.