The season isn’t lost, but the opportunity is.
And in today’s world of college athletics, opportunity is everything.
The Kansas football team had two golden opportunities to get people on board in a big way during the past two weeks — one against the program’s biggest rival at home for the first time in 21 years and the other this past weekend in a first-of-its-kind showcase game at one of the most famous sports venues on the planet in Jolly Old England.
Both were winnable games. Either would’ve done wonders for getting this fanbase ultra-excited about the rest of the season.
And they biffed them both.
That’s not just a bad deal. That’s a big deal, because the natives are now restless, as they say.
I’m not just talking about the Twitter heroes either. There’s a bit of theater that goes along with that crowd, performances that would play well in London’s famed West End.
I’m talking about moms and dads, recent grads, longtime diehards and your casual observers who just want to show up, watch their team play well and hard and win a few of these bigger games.
It has happened, of course, in the years since Lance Leipold took control. But it hasn’t happened nearly enough lately.
And I suspect you’ll see the results of that when Middle Tennessee comes to town in two weeks and the game is played in front of a less-than-enthused crowd and a more-empty-than-it-would've-been David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium.
Opportunity lost. Crisis uncovered?
All because of a crappy punt and a couple of crummy passes. And more turnovers. Oh, the turnovers.
When the 2026 KU football schedule first came out, it certainly didn’t look easy. Any game with Missouri is always, well, a war, and the Sun Devils are led by one of the best young coaches in the game who, two years ago, had them in the College Football Playoff.
So, yeah. Tough tests to be sure. But now that we’ve actually seen both games and seen how close KU was to competing on that level, it only makes the whole missed opportunity thing ring louder.
A reasonable goal all along seemed to be for KU to come home from London at 2-1. Follow that up with a home win over Middle Tennessee after your bye week and you’re suddenly sitting at 3-1 entering Week 6, halfway to bowl eligibility and with the fans buzzing about where things are headed.
Sure, 3-0 would’ve been nice, but winning both games was always going to be a long shot. Getting one of them, though, seemed doable. It was. They didn’t.
And now the chatter around the program is a lot of doom and gloom and more about people wondering if Lance Leipold is the guy that can get KU to the next level than how the defense fought its ass off on Saturday or which three of the nine remaining games give KU the best shot to get back into a bowl game.
Instead of the juice, these Jayhawks are just getting squeezed, with Leipold, Zeke Marshall and DK McDonald taking the most abuse.
I’ve been a big proponent of the big picture and stepping back and realizing just how much Leipold has accomplished at Kansas. I still am. But games like these last two make it harder to think broad because the brushstrokes that you’re seeing on the canvas in front of you are more rugrat than Rembrandt.
The Jayhawks will push forward. It’s their job to do so and, in good times and bad, they’ve proven to be pretty good at it. For that, Leipold and the culture he has created in Lawrence do deserve big time credit.
But it seems clear that people want — or maybe now it's need — to see a few more wins at this point, just to believe that the program is on stable ground and still capable of building upon the turnaround that Leipold already has delivered.
So, the question now is not how the team will respond or react. The question lies with you, the fan, and what you’ll do from here.
Opportunities like these last two weeks don’t come along all that often, so it’s a killer when you miss out on them. Yeah, the Big 12 slate offers those kinds of games week in and week out, but it's tough to go into that guns blazing when you take a couple shots to the chin in the opening weeks.
That causes teams to lose momentum, teams lose confidence, and, yeah, teams lose fans.
Have the Jayhawks lost theirs and, if so, can they get them back?
— For tickets to all KU athletic events, visit kuathletics.com
