The competitive nature & soulful spirit of KU kicker Laith Marjan

There are things every Kansas football fan probably wants to know about first-year place kicker Laith Marjan, who came to KU in the offseason after stints at East Carolina and South Alabama.

He’s on the Lou Groza Award Preseason Watch List. He was second team all-Sun Belt last season. He has a career long of 49 yards. He’s never attempted a game-winner. And he has been pushed to 57 yards in practice so far this month and has the confidence to hit from even farther.

While all of that and more will matter a lot this fall for the Jayhawks, there’s a laundry list of other factors in Marjan’s journey as a kicker that brought him to Kansas.

And it all started with a mistake.

Already playing for one of the best soccer club teams in North Carolina during his middle school days, Marjan, a native of Raleigh who believed he was destined to be “a soccer star,” was hit with devastating news when he was cut from the high school team at age 14.

The coaches told him after their decision that they didn’t need another midfielder. One problem. Marjan played outside back. Stunned, he moved quickly to make the most of a terrible outcome.

“In the moment, it was one of the most humiliating and embarrassing experiences I had ever had,” he told R1S1 Sports earlier this week after practice. “I was really excited to be on this high school team, with all my best friends. And they cut me. I was more than qualified to be on the team, and I think it was a legit mistake. But, it was a blessing in disguise because now I’m here.”

The very next week Marjan joined his high school football team, as much as anything to stay in shape for the club soccer team which he had already made later that year.

“I’m gonna do football, stay in shape, lift weights, do the workouts, and it was supposed to only be a 1-year thing,” he recalled thinking. “But then I fell in love with it. And here we are.”

Marjan’s mom, Jan, who worked as an ophthalmology writer with experience in researching the effects of head trauma and vision, did not want her son anywhere near the vicious nature of the game on the gridiron. She told him he could play. But only if he remained a kicker.

“My mom was like, ‘You’re not allowed to play any other position. You’re allowed to do the workouts, but you’re not allowed to hit,’ and she was very firm on that,” he said. “She talked to the coach and made sure he understood that, too, and he was like, ‘All right, let’s see if you can kick a football.’”

As one might expect, he very much could. And for the next few years, he spent his Friday nights doing just that.

The transition to football, with its strong standing in the community and Americana culture, helped Marjan get over getting cut from the soccer team. And before he knew it, he was a football player.

“It took a while,” he said of getting over the pain of getting cut. “But I think once I started actually playing football on Friday nights and I was on varsity and dressing out and I was in the game, it was like, ‘Oh, this is pretty cool. I could get used to this. I’m OK.’”

Marjan has been hit over the years. And he’s dished out a few blows, too.

After all, as KU special teams coach Taiwo Onatolu gushed on Tuesday, Marjan is an “extremely competitive guy,” so it’s not as if he shies away from anything when he’s out there.

“They come looking for you when you’re a kicker, but also I’m a competitor, so if you come looking for me, I’ll be there,” he said. “I’ve always had the mentality that if that returner needs to be brought down I’m gonna try.”

"... I’m a competitor, so if you come looking for me, I’ll be there."

— First-year KU kicker Laith Marjan

Seeing how neither of his parents played sports, Marjan, 22, said it’s a bit of a mystery where his competitive fire came from. He credits his 19-year-old younger brother, Zaid, who was an accomplished high school wrestler and is now enrolled at the University of North Carolina, for a lot of it. And traces most of it back to the feelings he got often, in all walks of life, throughout his childhood.

“Growing up, in anything I did I wanted to be the best,” he said. “And I got very frustrated if I wasn’t the best.”

That drive and the chip it placed on his shoulder served him well as he made his way up through the ranks. He still remembers his first made field goal in college — a 39-yarder from the left hash in the 2024 season opener against North Texas.

Not because it was a clutch kick or because there was anything unique about it. Instead, because it was the first sign, after three years of college football before it, that he could actually kick at the collegiate level.

“It kind of brought everything together of, like, ‘I can do this,’” Marjan recalled on Tuesday. “I was always told I couldn't, and so that was like the first element of, ‘Yeah, you were wrong.”

Marjan has always been pretty cerebral, as an athlete and a person.

As an Arab-American male of a father born in Kuwait and white mother who has played football in eastern North Carolina, the deep south in Mobile, Alabama and now the Midwest, he said he has always remained comfortable talking about things like politics and religion and really relishes learning from different points of view.

That’s been important, he said, because he doesn’t exactly look the part of the prototypical place kicker. He has tattoos, piercings, passion and, as Onatolu put it, “a big personality.”

One thing that all of his experiences have taught him is that there’s an element of his personality that he will never compromise.

“I know that, already, I don’t necessarily fit the mold of what a kicker normally looks like,” he said. “And I think that I don’t necessarily fit the mold with a lot of things in life. All these things that are maybe a little bit taboo, I’m comfortable talking about. The No. 1 thing I’ve always told myself is I’m not gonna be afraid to be who I am and I’m not gonna be afraid to put myself out there. Somebody’s always going to not like you, somebody’s not gonna like the way you look. But the one thing that nobody can take away from me is he’s authentic.”

Because of that mindset, he tends to gravitate toward people who are more accepting and he’s found a lot of that in his short time at Kansas, both within his position and in the specialists room and throughout the roster.

He’s happy to report that he has yet to be denied an opportunity because of his tattoos or outspoken nature. And he said he loves being around people who appreciate him as much for his quirkiness as his ability to put the ball through the uprights, which he did 16 times in 17 opportunities last season, along with a clip of 42-for-44 on extra points.

That’s who Laith Alexander Marjan is, the Arab-American whose first name means lion in Arabic and who proudly wears a tattoo of a lion on his upper-left chest with the animal wearing a crown that features his last name written in Arabic.

“I think that walking around in life and trying to fit a mold or trying to be somebody who you're necessarily not can hurt you in the long run,” he began. “And I want people around me who know, OK, this is the kicker that, he's got tattoos and he's got piercings and he's got a little shit with him and he’s different. But they accept me for that. Those are the people that I want in my life.”

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