photo by: AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez

Kansas head coach Bill Self responds to questions during a post game news conference following an NCAA college basketball game against TCU in Fort Worth, Texas, Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2025.

In a previous column I spent an unjustifiable amount of first time, then space, essentially trying to project what ultimately amounted to two fictional regular-season nonconference games for the Kansas men’s basketball team.

KU then proceeded to announce the rest of its nonconference schedule on June 4 before I could even publish the remainder of my predictions — for all the world knows now, they could have been completely correct. (They were not. Games I forecasted with what I thought was fairly sound reasoning would be against Hampton, St. Thomas and Valparaiso were actually against Davidson, Texas A&M-Corpus Christi and Towson. Still pending, though, are KU’s exact opponents in the Players Era tournament; I predicted Auburn, UNLV and St. John’s.)

By the way, KU’s nonconference schedule does end a week earlier than I anticipated, with a home game against Davidson on Dec. 22. That’s interesting because teams like Iowa State and Houston will reportedly be playing nonleague games a full seven days later.

It would make sense, then, for Big 12 play to start on Saturday, Jan. 3, since that provides the league with 19 matchdays ahead of its March 10 tournament, similar to how its schedule worked in 2023-24. But would it be remotely reasonable to try to guess which KU games, and which open date, the league might pick for those 19 matchdays?

Well, to some extent, a few Big 12 Conference matchups are easy to pencil in based on the last two years of data.

For example, over the past couple years, Kansas played some teams away in one year and in the other year both home and away. It should specifically host those schools this year.

It also played another team once both places and once only at home; it probably needs to go on the road and play that school this year.

That makes it fairly easy to say KU should host Baylor, Iowa State and UCF and travel to Oklahoma State in 2025-26. Also, KU will invariably play Kansas State for the Sunflower Showdown both at Allen Fieldhouse and Bramlage Coliseum.

Nothing is particularly easy beyond that, for a variety of reasons.

The main one is that the composition of the conference has not remained consistent. Four new teams came in as part of the 2023-24 campaign, then two left and were replaced by four more for 2024-25, yielding 16 total teams. In the meantime, the Big 12 switched from 18 to 20 league games and is now going back to 18.

Except when it did 18 before, in 2023-24, it only had 14 teams, so schools played five opponents twice each and the remaining eight once apiece. Now it has 16, meaning each team will play home-and-home with a mere three other schools.

I will tackle these challenges and more below, as I construct the final chapter of KU’s hypothetical 2025-26 schedule.

Figuring out opponents

Who are the best candidates for KU’s other two two-way opponents, besides its Sunflower Showdown rival?

For the sake of simplicity — as much as such a thing is possible — let’s pick from teams KU has played once at home and once on the road in the last two years (BYU, Cincinnati, TCU, Texas Tech, West Virginia), one team it has faced in both places each of the last two years (only Houston) and one team it played twice that joined the conference last year (Colorado).

KU-BYU is an absolute no-brainer as a two-time matchup this year for nonlogistical reasons. The matchups between arguably the top two freshmen in the country, the favorites for the top two picks in the 2026 NBA Draft, KU’s Darryn Peterson and BYU’s AJ Dybantsa, will be a gold mine for television ratings.

The KU brand is large enough that the Jayhawks will need to play another top team twice, but I don’t think it will be Houston after KU was subjected to Kelvin Sampson’s squads a total of four times the last two years. Tech, which made the Elite Eight, seems like a good bet. So now we’ve got our three two-time opponents.

From there we can do some more deduction. KU only hosted the Arizona schools last year; it should therefore make a two-game road swing through the Copper State this season, as it did on an ill-fated trip through Utah in February. Meanwhile, the Utes should visit Allen Fieldhouse for the first time as Big 12 members, probably the same week that BYU does for similar schedule-pairing purposes.

Left over still, by process of elimination, are Cincinnati, Colorado, Houston, TCU and West Virginia. The one-way opponents from last year should alternate locations, which will bring Cincinnati and TCU back to Allen Fieldhouse and send KU back to Morgantown for another battle with West Virginia.

We now have two empty slots left to fill — both road-only opponents — and the two teams that will have to fill them are Colorado and Houston.

With all that done, here’s our full set of opponents for 2025-26, based on the above deductions:

Home only: Baylor, Cincinnati, Iowa State, TCU, UCF, Utah

Road only: Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, Houston, Oklahoma State, West Virginia

Both: BYU, Kansas State, Texas Tech

That wouldn’t be a bad draw for KU, all things considered.

Plotting these on a calendar

As mentioned, let’s stick with Jan. 3 as the starting date for the league schedule, and have the slate wrap up on March 7.

Before going any further I should mention a piece of unfortunate information that Big 12 men’s basketball head Brian Thornton shared with the Arizona Daily Star: The league could “sometimes have games every night of the week next season.”

I am not ready to reckon with the prospect of KU playing league games on Thursday and Friday, nor could I possibly conceive of how they might be assigned (presumably based on the whims of television partners), and so will stick primarily, though not exclusively to Tuesdays, Saturdays and ESPN’s Big Mondays — the longtime fixtures of a Big 12 slate.

For the sake of everyone’s sanity, I won’t go day by day through 19 matchdays, but will simply note that 1) KU has in recent seasons played three Big Monday games, 2) does not do so after returning from weekend road trips and 3) while it often goes Tuesday-Saturday when it has back-to-back games on the road, it did play at Iowa State on a Wednesday after being at Cincinnati on Saturday last year.

In addition, a couple matchups with top teams in the league have been understandably reserved for the final weekends of the year, when they could have the greatest immediate effect on the conference title race.

Here’s my proposal:

Saturday, Jan. 3: at Colorado

Tuesday, Jan. 6: vs. Baylor

Saturday, Jan. 10: vs. Iowa State

Monday, Jan. 12: at Kansas State

Saturday, Jan. 17: vs. Cincinnati

Tuesday, Jan. 20: Open date

Saturday, Jan. 24: at BYU

Wednesday, Jan. 28: at Oklahoma State

Saturday, Jan. 31: vs. UCF

Monday, Feb. 2: vs. Texas Tech

Saturday, Feb. 7: at West Virginia

Tuesday, Feb. 10: vs. Kansas State

Saturday, Feb. 14: at Houston

Tuesday, Feb. 17: vs. TCU

Saturday, Feb. 21: at Arizona

Tuesday, Feb. 24: at Arizona State

Saturday, Feb. 28: vs. Utah

Monday, March 2: vs. BYU

Saturday, March 7: at Texas Tech