The conference portions of the KU men’s and women’s basketball schedules for the upcoming 2025-26 season were released last week, and there were plenty of things that jumped out about both of them.
The KU men will enter the season ranked and perhaps even a bit underrated and overlooked, with freshman phenom Darryn Peterson and returning big man Flory Bidunga leading a brand-new team into battle.
The KU women are entering what is arguably one of the top two or three most highly anticipated seasons in program history, with a handful of high-impact newcomers teaming with returning junior S’Mya Nichols and several key players and starters from last season’s team.
While the work is already under way, they’ll both officially tip off the season at Late Night in the Phog on Oct. 17.
After that, it’s a pair of exhibition games two weeks later before the seasons officially start in early November.
With that in mind, here’s a look at the top eight things that stood out about the two recently released schedules.
• Season openers – The KU women will play host to Kansas City on Nov. 5 at Allen Fieldhouse, and the men will get things started with a home game against Green Bay two days earlier on Nov. 3. Things get decidedly more difficult for Bill Self’s squad from there, with a Game 2 date at North Carolina on Nov. 7. The Big 12 openers for both teams will feature the KU men at UCF on Jan. 3 (they played the Knights three times last season) and Dec. 21 at Iowa State for the women. The KU women also will play on New Year’s Day, while the men will not.
• Big Monday, baby! – The KU men, even with 16 teams now in the conference, still get more Big Monday ESPN games than any other program. The Jayhawks will be on Big Monday three times this season, with road games at Texas Tech (Feb. 2) and Houston (Feb. 23) surrounding the lone home Big Monday contest against Arizona on Feb. 9. Here’s a bit of a good-news note regarding KU’s three Big Monday games. All three come on the heels of KU home games, so the travel for the quick-turnarounds on the road should not be too much of a nightmare. In years past, KU has faced a couple of instances when they’ve been on the road on Saturday or played late on Saturday and then had to turn around and travel again for a Big Monday game. Nice to avoid those as much as possible, and this schedule does that, although we don’t know game times just yet.
• Circle this game: KU vs. BYU, Jan. 31 at Allen Fieldhouse – The Cougars are on their way up, and they’ve been coming for a while. Anyone who wants to win the Big 12 moving forward is going to have to deal with them. So, this game is going to be good every year, here or there. But this particular game stands to be the Game of the Year because it pits KU’s Darryn Peterson against BYU forward A.J. Dybantsa, the No. 1 and No. 2-ranked players in the 2025 high school class. They won’t necessarily guard each other, but they’ve had some incredible battles already and should be in line to add to their history together with this game. If there’s a shame surrounding either schedule, it’s that the Big 12 didn’t pencil in two KU-BYU games during the upcoming season.
See for yourself...
Official KU women's basketball schedule for 2025-26
Official KU men's basketball schedule for 2025-26
• A couple of fun one’s for the women – We’ve made plenty about the return of the Border War in both men’s basketball and football in recent years, but now it’s the KU women’s team’s turn to resume the rivalry. The Jayhawks and Tigers will play at 3 p.m. Nov. 15 at T-Mobile Center in Kansas City, Missouri, and it should be fun to see what kind of crowd this one draws. The men are home against Princeton that day, but we do not have a game time for that one yet. In addition to the renewal of the KU-MU series, the Jayhawks will play, of all teams, Haskell, this season, at home on Dec. 17. Haskell, you might remember, made news last year when head coach Adam Strom was the victim of federally mandated layoffs late in the season but chose to stay with the program through its postseason run despite not getting paid. It was a cool story, and several people in the community came to Strom’s aid in creating a GoFundMe page to help compensate him for his time.
• It’s the Players Era era – KU will be in Las Vegas over Thanksgiving, taking on Notre Dame, Syracuse and a to-be-determined third foe in the annual Players Era event. There will be some big time teams, players and coaches in Vegas at this event and while the games KU drew might not wow you yet, the event itself should, with an early winner-take-all vibe flowing through every game, with cold, hard cash instead of just a nice trophy on the line in this one. Each team already is guaranteed to collect a payout of at least $1 million in NIL money for appearing in the event, and the winner will collect an additional $1 million. You’ll see more and more events like these as the years go by, but this one will always be the first and that’s why you see so many big-time programs participating. As Houston coach Kelvin Sampson told ESPN after appearing in last year’s slightly smaller inaugural event, “I couldn’t say no.”
• KU women headed to the beach – Brandon Schneider’s team will be in Fort Myers, Florida in late-November, for two games in the Fort Myers Tip-Off, against Georgia and Dayton. Those opponents are two of five notable non-conference tests that Schneider and his young-but-talented squad will face on its way to preparing for the start of Big 12 play. The women’s side of Big 12 basketball isn’t quite as loaded as the men’s. So, there will be a night off here or there. But not early, as two of the Jayhawks’ first three games are on the road — at Iowa State and at UCF — with the Big 12 home opener coming in between those two against West Virginia. That start, and the lofty goals this team is likely to have, will make working out all the kinks and coming together in non-conference play an absolute must for the KU women.
• KU men face typically nasty schedule – North Carolina, Duke and UConn, all before Dec. 3. The aforementioned Players Era event. Missouri. At NC State and a trip to Louisville for an exhibition game. That’s before the Big 12 gauntlet. No matter what he has learned about making the schedule — it’s been too tough for young teams, too front-loaded at times and too exhausting, travel-wise and emotionally, at others — KU coach Bill Self continues to create monster challenge after monster challenge for his team, with this season’s schedule being as tough as any of them from the past. Self, of course, loves the test and the opportunity for his players to come together and get tougher before conference play begins, which, in and of itself, is its own monster challenge these days, with expansion and the addition of several elite teams.
• Toughest men’s stretch – The first one that jumps out is from Jan. 24 through Feb. 2, when KU plays at K-State then hosts BYU and then travels to Texas Tech for a Big Monday game against the Red Raiders. That’ll be a serious stretch, with some big-time emotions factoring into it. But there’s also the closing stretch, which features a Big Monday game at home against Houston (following a Saturday home game vs. Cincinnati) and then back-to-back road games in Arizona, followed by the regular season finale at home against K-State on March 7. The more I like at it, the more I think that everything from Valentine’s Day on is going to be a heck of a stretch, starting with back-to-back road games at Iowa State and Oklahoma State before that closing stretch we mentioned above.
• Toughest women’s stretch — Jan. 17 to 25… at Arizona State, at Arizona and home vs. Kansas State. The Big 12 has been great about allowing teams to travel to the same distant locations in back-to-back games to make the burden of these longer trips much easier to manage. So, the Jayhawks will go back-to-back in the state of Arizona before returning home for the home edition of this year’s Sunflower Showdown. ASU has a new coach and should be much improved. And the Arizona Wildcats won four of their last five a season ago en route to a 19-win season. Oh, and if you’re curious about the games that bookend this stretch, you’re talking Oklahoma State at home and at defending Big 12 champ TCU. This will be a big couple of weeks for Schneider’s squad.
— For tickets to all KU athletic events, visit kuathletics.com
