photo by: AP Photo/LM Otero

Kansas head coach Lance Leipold during the Big 12 NCAA college football media days in Frisco, Texas, Wednesday, July 9, 2025.

Frisco, Texas — When Lance Leipold was an assistant coach at Nebraska-Omaha, the start of the football season was quite a ways away from July 24 — the day on which he and his wife Kelly were wed in 1999.

“I got married, went on a week’s honeymoon, came back and still had over a week before the team reported,” Leipold recalled in February, shortly after KU’s schedule was announced.

This year, because the Jayhawks are playing their first game on Aug. 23 as part of college football’s “week zero” — a small subset of games played a week before most teams begin the season — they begin fall camp on, as it happens, July 24, as Leipold said on Wednesday. That’s “fall” camp a full 60 days before the fall equinox, by the way.

Teams that face Hawaii are allowed to begin their schedules in week zero. KU’s first opponent, Fresno State, is one such team.

The unusual bit of scheduling results in a season that starts one week earlier as compared to the usual, and features three total bye weeks for the Jayhawks. (The University of Kansas also moved its academic calendar up a week, in part to account for the change.)

“Work is work to me,” quarterback Jalon Daniels said. “At the end of the day, it just makes me a week earlier to be able to get back into the office. This is the part of the year that almost every football player is looking forward to getting to.”

Tight end DeShawn Hanika is no exception.

“It’s what we all signed up for,” he said. “If I were to tell myself at 8 years old, ‘Hey, you’re going to be playing football on July 23,’ I’d be ecstatic.”

Indeed, for Leipold and his team, all told, the early start and its consequences do not require too much of an adjustment. The three bye weeks fall at fairly opportune times — after the nonconference finale at Missouri, after the first four league games, following three more.

“There’s not a lot to really change other than give more days off as we go through those open weeks,” he said, “and hopefully we’ll keep ourselves on a good rotation between rest and practice.”

The Jayhawks at least face a somewhat more manageable situation than two of their longtime conference rivals, Iowa State and Kansas State. Those teams will face off in Dublin, Ireland, on the same day, Aug. 23. Not only is the game higher-level conference competition, it takes place overseas, and each team has to return home and continue its schedule as normal ahead of the following Saturday.

ISU coach Matt Campbell said on Tuesday that he doesn’t think any school has necessarily handled the week-zero game well in the past; whether a team wins or loses, it can often have trouble the following week.

“I think when you look at this, you got to look at it in its entirety,” he said, “and you got to be able to look at what are the challenges, how did you set up your spring calendar, how do you set up your summer calendar, how do you a great job of making sure practice fits, fall camp fits, the lead-up to this unique opportunity in week zero.”

The far-reaching consequences of the early start clearly got across to Campbell’s players, as well as those of his KSU counterpart Chris Klieman.

“Everything we do during the season, our season’s longer,” ISU defensive tackle Domonique Orange said. “Say we go to the national championship, our season’s a week longer than anyone else’s.”

K-State defensive end Cody Stufflebean added: “Everything’s bumped up a little faster and there’s not necessarily as much room to have any error, so you have to be really locked in to be able to go and play against a really talented and disciplined team (in) week zero.”

As it happened, Klieman demonstrated some consensus with his Sunflower Showdown rival when he responded to a question about week-zero scheduling at Big 12 media days on Tuesday by initially bringing up a similar topic to what Leipold had in February.

“Well, it stinks from a vacation standpoint, I’ll tell you that,” he said. “We’re back at work a full week earlier than we would typically be. Time away from your families and your children, that’s the hard thing.”

KU, for its part, doesn’t face the logistical challenges that the Cyclones and Wildcats will have to handle upon returning from Ireland, but the Jayhawks do have a short week following their first game. They will stay at home at the newly reopened David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium to host Wagner six days later.