Kansas head coach Bill Self looks out from the team huddle during a timeout in the second half on Sunday, March 22, 2026 at Viejas Arena in San Diego. Photo by Nick Krug

The Kansas men’s basketball nonconference schedule is drawing closer to completion with Wednesday’s announcement of a home-and-home series with Villanova and Thursday’s release of the Players Era brackets.

That checks the box of a marquee home game at Allen Fieldhouse for the Jayhawks and brings them to an anticipated eight nonconference dates: Kentucky at the Champions Classic in Chicago on Nov. 10, three games as part of the Players Era Eight in Las Vegas the week before Thanksgiving, Villanova on Nov. 27, UConn in Connecticut, Missouri at the T-Mobile Center and Ohio State at the CBS Sports Classic in New York on Dec. 19.

If that all goes off as planned, KU will have five remaining nonconference spots to fill with buy games against mid-major foes, just as it did last season.

Rosters aren’t fully set at this point of the offseason, but in most cases they’re quite close. KU, for example, has 13 of its 15 possible roster spots occupied. To review, the roster contains returners Paul Mbiya and Kohl Rosario; transfers Leroy Blyden Jr. (Toledo), Keanu Dawes (Utah), Dennis Parker Jr. (Radford) and Christian Reeves (Charleston); and freshmen Davion Adkins, Luke Barnett, Taylen Kinney, Grant Mordini, Trent Perry, Atticus Richmond and Tyran Stokes. (There’s also non-counting returning walk-on Will Thengvall.)

The season is still more than five months away, but many of the Jayhawks’ known opponents have nearly full teams, too. That means it’s as good a time as any to take a look at how the schedule is shaping up.

• Before the year begins in earnest, KU will host Louisville for an exhibition. That’s unusual to begin with because the Jayhawks have exclusively played their Division I exhibition foes on the road in recent years — Illinois, Arkansas and Louisville — but it’ll also be an odd game because former KU center Flory Bidunga will play in Allen Fieldhouse again before he has even appeared at KFC Yum! Center as a Cardinal.

Bidunga still has to withdraw his name from the NBA Draft — the deadline is Wednesday — but he reportedly signed with the Cardinals on Tuesday. His marquee acquisition headlines a loud offseason for Louisville in which it turned over nearly its whole roster and brought in big names like former Oregon guard Jackson Shelstad, who averaged 15.6 points per game prior to injury, and center Obinna Ekezie Jr., who had been one of the top players in the 2027 class but reclassified up to join early. Alvaro Folgueiras (Iowa) and Karter Knox (Arkansas) were notable pieces on good teams last season.

It should all make for an uncommonly intense environment for a game that ultimately does not count, one that will likely form quite a contrast with the inevitable exhibition against a Division II foe that follows.

• Kentucky has rarely been in the news for positive reasons this offseason. Perhaps most notably, the top-ranked freshman Stokes picked KU over UK, which will provide an interesting storyline for the matchup on Nov. 10. But Kentucky also missed opportunities to reel in players like Syracuse transfer Donnie Freeman, who went to St. John’s, and guard Robert Wright III, who returned to BYU.

The Wildcats’ roster is still a work in progress, as center Malachi Moreno may choose to stay in the NBA Draft himself, while Kentucky could be a contender for former Iowa State forward Milan Momcilovic if he returns to college. But despite the widely publicized misses, they’ve hit on some players, including guards Zoom Diallo (15.7 points per game at Washington) and Alex Wilkins (17.8 at Furman), as well as forward Justin McBride from James Madison, whose decision became public immediately before that of Stokes.

• The Players Era matchups are a bit of a mystery, but less so since ESPN announced on Thursday afternoon that KU will open its run at Michelob Ultra Arena against hometown foe UNLV on Nov. 17.

The new bracket format means that the tournament organizers cannot necessarily prevent the Jayhawks from facing off against conference foes Houston or West Virginia, or the one team it played last year, Notre Dame. Any of those matchups could happen in successive days after the UNLV game. But it made sense for the Players Era to pick one of Auburn, Florida, Rutgers or UNLV as the Jayhawks’ first, completely controllable foe.

As for the Rebels, they are entering their second year under Josh Pastner, the former Georgia Tech coach, after tying for seventh in the Mountain West and reaching the second round of the NIT last year. They retained some young players who produced last season in forward Tyrin Jones and guard Issac Williamson, who were both part-time starters as freshmen, although high-volume scoring guard Dra Gibbs-Lawhorn returned to the power-conference level to join Texas Tech.

Pastner recently flipped an incoming freshman forward, Jackson Kiss, from Iowa State. The Rebels’ most prominent transfer is probably recently acquired guard Alyn Breed, who (assuming he is able to get a medical redshirt) will be a seventh-year senior and previously played at Providence, McNeese and N.C. State.

(For the record, if KU wins, it will face the winner between Auburn and WVU. Otherwise, it will be consigned to consolation games for the following two days.)

• Villanova has not quite regained the heights of the Jay Wright era, when it did battle with KU in four separate NCAA Tournaments. But after three sluggish seasons with Kyle Neptune at the helm, the hiring of former Seton Hall and Maryland coach Kevin Willard helped the Wildcats have some success in a weak year for the Big East and ultimately get back to the tournament in March — albeit as a No. 8 seed that fell immediately to Utah State.

The Wildcats lost three members of last season’s highly consistent starting lineup but retained guard Tyler Perkins (13.7 points per game) and forward Matt Hodge (9.2). Willard has put together a solid transfer class that ranks No. 18 nationally on 247Sports with a mixture of mid-major guards and high-major forwards, and also signed guard Adam Oumiddoch, who scored 28.2 points per game in Overtime Elite last season.

• UConn beat KU for the first time ever last season in a gritty 61-56 contest at Allen Fieldhouse. Those Huskies went on to reach the national title game with a postseason run that was not short on dramatics, highlighted by Braylon Mullins’ game-winning shot in the Elite Eight against Duke.

Mullins decided to stay at UConn rather than pursue the NBA Draft. The Huskies also get back Silas Demary Jr., a fellow double-digit scorer from last season. But otherwise they’ll look quite a bit different, especially with star guard Solo Ball missing the whole season due to wrist surgery.

UConn stayed within the Big East to snag Najai Hines, a premier shot blocker who played at Seton Hall. Elsewhere, Nikolas Khamenia was a highly touted recruit who played but did not feature heavily at Duke. Junior County (Highland, Utah) and Colben Landrew (Alabaster, Alabama) will look to figure in as freshmen.

• Missouri seems poised to make some real waves in the SEC this year with head coach Dennis Gates’ best recruiting class and a handful of transfers whose names will be familiar to KU fans — most of all forward Bryson Tiller, who did the unthinkable by crossing rivalry lines to play for the Tigers.

MU’s main returning player is 6-foot-10 wing Trent Pierce, who missed nonconference play last year but figured in more prominently over the course of SEC play and also shot the ball the best he has in his career. The headliners this season, however, will most likely be freshmen Jason Crowe Jr. and Toni Bryant. Crowe, a guard, is the all-time leading scorer in the history of the state of California and averaged a whopping 43.6 points per game as a senior. Bryant is a powerful 6-foot-9 forward who is a 247Sports Composite five-star.

Tiller will join the frontcourt with players like Bryant and Tennessee transfer Jaylen Carey. Missouri also added Big East all-freshman wing Jamier Jones from Providence, among others.

• Ohio State hasn’t popped up on KU’s schedule since the schools met three times in the span of just over a year between 2011 and 2012, but now the two programs will meet again via the CBS Sports Classic.

The Buckeyes took a step forward in their second year under Jake Diebler, but lost in the first round of the NCAA Tournament after an entertaining clash with TCU. OSU will not be starting totally fresh in 2026-27 thanks to the return of guard John Mobley Jr., who went through the NBA Draft process. An impact player since his arrival at OSU who will be a junior, Mobley averaged 15.7 points on 41.1% 3-point shooting last year. Forward Amare Bynum will hope to make a leap of his own in his sophomore season after tallying 9.7 points and 4.9 rebounds per game as a freshman.

The big news for the scarlet and gray is the arrival of 6-foot-8 wing Anthony Thompson, who at the time of his signing was the Buckeyes’ highest-ranked recruit since Jared Sullinger in 2010. Justin Pippen, the son of Scottie and a former Cal standout, is the biggest-name transfer addition.

photo by: AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki

Ohio State guard John Mobley Jr. (0) reacts after a three-point basket in the first half of an NCAA college basketball game against Purdue Sunday, March 1, 2026, in Columbus, Ohio.

photo by: AP Photo/Kayla Wolf

Villanova guard Tyler Perkins, center, scores a three-point basket during the first half of an NCAA college basketball game as Villanova forward Duke Brennan (24) and Wisconsin guard Jack Janicki (5) look on Friday, Dec. 19, 2025, in Milwaukee.

photo by: AP Photo/Abbie Parr

UConn guard Braylon Mullins moves the ball against Michigan during the first half of the NCAA college basketball tournament national championship game at the Final Four, Monday, April 6, 2026, in Indianapolis.