photo by: Mike Gunnoe/Journal-World photo

Fans wave the wheat after a touchdown against BYU Saturday, Sept. 23, 2023 at David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium.

The world at large is still about four weeks out from learning anything of substance about the 2025 Kansas football team (when the Jayhawks start spring practice), six months from getting a sense of which players might make significant contributions during the season (based on fall camp) and just a bit longer from seeing the Jayhawks take the field at David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium for the first time.

That means there’s plenty of time right now for those of us who like to analyze and overanalyze to dwell on the release of KU’s schedule.

All of this dwelling must come with a significant caveat: Any assessments of a schedule’s difficulty, six and a half months before it begins, are likely going to be wildly off base.

Just about everyone thought the Jayhawks had a wide-open path to competing for the Big 12 Conference title in 2024 because they dodged the likes of Arizona, Oklahoma State and Utah. All three of those teams turned out to be pretty bad last season and nearly everybody else KU played ended up being good, resulting in by at least one metric the nation’s most challenging schedule.

As such, the various takes that follow will contain minimal claims about various teams’ on-field viability. KU has a brand-new roster anyway, so it’s difficult to guess how they will match up against anyone.

This team needs time to ramp up — and will get it

The squad KU brings onto the field in 2025 will be nearly unrecognizable outside of the man under center (or more likely in the shotgun), quarterback Jalon Daniels. Even if most of KU’s 22 transfer-portal additions are on campus through the spring and will be well acquainted with each other by August, the Jayhawks will undoubtedly need time to jell on the field.

It’s quite fortunate for KU, then, that it gets a head start on just about every other college football team (except eventual foes Kansas State and Iowa State, who play in Ireland that weekend) by hosting Fresno State for a “week zero” game on Aug. 23. Not only that, the Jayhawks have an additional home tuneup against FCS Wagner before braving Faurot Field at Memorial Stadium to rekindle the Border Showdown. By then they should have developed something resembling a rhythm. (By the way, with the Wagner game on Friday, Aug. 29, KU has an extra day of preparation compared to its rivals, who host Central Arkansas on Aug. 30.)

The layout of KU’s conference schedule is also fortuitous. The Jayhawks have an open date on Sept. 13 while four league foes are already playing each other. And before they have to go on the road to UCF and Texas Tech, a pair of tough environments, they play games at David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium against a West Virginia team with a new head coach and a Cincinnati squad that has finished below .500 each of the last two seasons. (OK, there’s just one mention of teams’ on-field prospects for 2025.)

KU started poorly in 2024 and had to play catch-up. Even with a brand-new roster, it’s hard to envision the season going off the rails so quickly this time around, simply because of the way it lays out.

KU couldn’t have asked for better bye-week timing

The week zero game, combined with the same calendar quirk that gave teams two open dates last year (it has to do with the timing of Labor Day), will give KU three bye weeks this year. That’s already great news for the Jayhawks from a rest and recuperation standpoint, especially if they find themselves at some point with a run of injuries like they had at the safety spot in 2024.

But the exact matchups before and after which KU gets its byes couldn’t have been set up any better for Lance Leipold and company.

The first one, as mentioned, is right after Missouri. Regardless of the outcome as the Jayhawks meet the Tigers for the first time since 2011, they’ll have gotten their first taste of power-conference competition — SEC, no less — in what will likely be an emotional, physical road battle. That bye will give KU the chance to evaluate where it stands entering its Big 12 opener and make any necessary adjustments, which will be especially useful for a team with two brand-new coordinators, including one who has never run his own defense before (D.K. McDonald).

The second open date occurs between the Texas Tech and Kansas State games, although KU won’t get a leg up on its rival, as K-State will also be coming off a bye.

The third could be the most significant of all. The Jayhawks make their first trip to Tucson, Arizona, in nearly six decades to face off against the Wildcats on Nov. 8. The Big 12 in 2024 demonstrated a propensity for scheduling late-night games for its westernmost teams to create a sort of “Big 12 after dark” window for its television partners. KU could find itself there again — as it did at BYU in 2024, though it got a bit of a reprieve with a more refined 7 p.m. Central Time kickoff at Arizona State.

If the Arizona game gets a late-night timeslot, the Jayhawks will likely be grateful they don’t have to deal with some of the logistical and scheduling issues their recent West Coast trips have caused. When they went to Nevada in 2023, they stayed overnight in Reno, then had to fly back home and squeeze in an evening practice because the day could not count as an off day by NCAA rules. After the BYU trip in 2024, KU instead flew straight back, resulting in a 6 a.m. arrival. In both of those cases, KU had to immediately begin preparing for a game six days later, which it does not have to do in 2025.

The Kansas State game should really take place later in the season

Granted, the Sunflower Showdown has not always historically occurred late in the month of November alongside the rest of college football’s storied rivalries. In one stretch through the ’80s and ’90s it occurred in October 13 out of 15 years. But in the 2010s it occupied a semi-regular place alongside the likes of The Game and the Iron Bowl in the final regular-season weekend of college football.

In 2025, it will take place in Lawrence on Oct. 25, just as it occurred in Manhattan on Oct. 26, 2024.

For one thing, it diminishes the grandeur of the rivalry game to move it willy-nilly from one place to another on the college football calendar. But if this late-October slot is the new place in which the Big 12 is going to consistently position it, that’s not particularly good either.

Ideally it should occur when the rest of those hallowed college football matchups do. The fact that the 2023 edition served as KU’s senior night, for example, added dramatically to the atmosphere and stakes surrounding that game.

Ending with Utah — yes, Daniels’ last-ever game at David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium will be against Utah — does a disservice to all involved. (As an aside, why aren’t the Utes playing the Holy War as their last game, either?) That’s no slight to Utah, a highly successful program in recent years, if not in 2024, and a welcome addition to the Big 12. But it could be a bit of an anticlimax to play a team for the fifth time ever when playing someone else for the 123rd is a reasonable possibility.

The alignment with men’s basketball scheduling is a little better

This has absolutely nothing to do with the KU football team’s on-field performance, but it’s a welcome sight: There are fewer scheduling conflicts between the KU football and men’s basketball teams lining up for this coming season, a result closer to the way things laid out in 2023 than 2024.

Last November, the KU men’s basketball team hosted Oakland on Nov. 16 and Furman on Nov. 30, both games occurring on days when KU football was on the road (at BYU and Baylor, respectively). That meant extremely delayed tipoff time announcements for basketball and logistical quagmires for the many KU fans (and media members!) invested in both sports.

This year’s timing is quite a lot more convenient, even though much of the KU men’s basketball schedule for 2025-26 remains unknown at this juncture. The Jayhawks’ road game at North Carolina, set for Nov. 14, occurs during a football bye week, with the Champions Classic matchup against Duke in New York on Nov. 18 immediately following the open date. The next KU football game after that is against Iowa State four days later, so Jayhawk fans won’t have to hop on planes over and over if they wish to go support their teams on the road.

Again, it’s possible the basketball Jayhawks could schedule a marquee game for the first week of its season, even possibly the night before the football team is in Arizona, but right now no such game is known to the public.

The only current tricky situation has to do with Thanksgiving week, when KU men’s basketball is slated to take part in the Players Era tournament in Las Vegas. Unlike something like the Maui Invitational, the 2024 edition of the Players Era occupied the entirety of the week, with games on Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday. The 2025 competition will feature an increased number of teams and its format has yet to be announced, but it’s hard to imagine any way that could somehow reduce its presence over the course of the week.

The football game against Utah has a date yet to be determined — it could take place on that Friday or Saturday — but either way it will likely conflict with the Players Era in some fashion.