Manhattan — When a team has lost to its in-state rival 18 consecutive times — that’s nearly 2 decades and a run that spans five different presidential terms — it’s only natural for people on the losing side to wonder, ‘Is this thing ever going to end?’
The answer is yes. Undeniably.
But for at least another year, the answer, for the long-suffering Kansas football program, is also not yet, after Lance Leipold’s team fell to the Kansas State Wildcats, 35-24, at Bill Snyder Family Stadium on a gorgeous fall afternoon.
As you surely know, the latest KU loss in the Sunflower Showdown ran K-State’s winning streak in the series to 18 straight, a feat that even I might not believe if I hadn’t seen every one of them.
But here we are, left, once again, to assess what went wrong, why the Jayhawks couldn’t get it done and how we got here in the first place.
Someday, the Jayhawks will win one of these. And when they do, the folks in Manhattan will analyze that 1-game Kansas winning streak with the kind of intensity and anger that the KU fan base has done with K-State’s seemingly ever-growing streak for the past 15 or so years.
Your guess is as good as mine as to when that day might come. And I won’t judge you for a second if you say it’ll be next year, 20 years from now or anything in between.
What I will tell you is, I think KU will end the streak when people least expect it.
I don’t know why. But for all the times the Wildcats have absolutely clobbered Kansas in this series, these past few years, when it has looked like KU actually has had a shot and, in many minds, has even been expected to win, the Jayhawks simply have not found a way to get it done.
A fumble here. A dropped interception there. Conservative play calling one time. A complete no-show another. You name it, we’ve probably seen it.
It’s not that the game is too big for one team and the other can handle it. It’s that one program knows how to win these games because they’ve done it so often and the other is still trying to figure out how to make it happen at any cost.
More from Saturday's KU loss in Manhattan...
If you’re so inclined — and I know many of you aren’t right now — you can look at aspects of Saturday’s loss and point the fact that KU was atrocious against the run, missed double-digit tackles, made back-breaking mistakes and, yet, still had a chance to win late in the game, down just eight with the ball and an opportunity to tie the game in the 4th quarter.
Maybe that speaks more to the KU program inching toward ending the madness than anything else. Even with the mistakes, the chances have been there of late.
But you also can’t talk about the mistakes as if they’re some bright spot in a bad-luck situation.
The mistakes are KU’s fault. The mistakes are the Jayhawks’ to own. The mistakes have to be eliminated or else the same thing is going to happen over and over and over, no matter what people expect to happen on the scoreboard.
We’ve seen it far too many times, both before Leipold arrived and throughout his six seasons leading the program, and understand clearly that it’s simply a matter of fact.
For a while on Saturday, while KU watched K-State rack up 568 yards of offense, including 359 on the ground, I considered that this actually might be the way and the day that Kansas snaps the losing streak.
Get pummeled in total yards and outplayed in many aspects of the game but force a turnover or two, get a key stop, hold K-State to field goals and find a way to finish with one more point on the scoreboard.
On a day when the stat sheet showed utter domination by the Wildcats, could KU actually wind up as the team smiling when the final horn sounded?
It wasn’t that far from happening. It certainly could have happened. It looked possible. And it seemed plausible.
But… well, you know the rest.
Remember 2018 — sorry! — during David Beaty’s final season as the KU head coach, and in this very same stadium, when the Jayhawks’ nearly ended the streak at 9 straight K-State victories?
A 9-point underdog going into that one, against a 3-6, Bill Snyder-led Kansas State team, the Jayhawks actually led the game with 5 minutes to play and were 32 yards from a game-winning score with less than a minute to play but broke down late to give the Wildcats their 10th consecutive win in the series at that time.
Beaty’s bunch, which won just six times total in his 4 seasons combined, played well — not well enough — and looked like an inspired football team that nearly stole a win when nobody was looking.
That’s the kind of day we’re talking about.
It seems too easy to expect a crazy streak like this to end on a day when people on both sides of the rivalry actually expect KU to win.
That was the case in 2023 and the Jayhawks fell short in heartbreaking fashion in the final game ever played at the old Memorial Stadium. Two years later, again in Lawrence, the Jayhawks were actually favored to win for once and got rocked.
And on Saturday, when one of K-State’s most prominent beat writers actually picked the Jayhawks to win, it was the Wildcats who made all the right plays when it mattered most.
So, yeah. At this point, the Jayhawks will take a win against the purple people from down the road however they can get one. Clean, ugly, lopsided, last-second. Doesn’t matter.
There’s no telling how far away that day actually is right now. But the streak will end someday. And the guess here is that it’s more likely than not to come when you least expect it.
— For tickets to all KU athletic events, visit kuathletics.com
