Wins are the only currency that matters when it comes to college football rivalries, and for those teams on the wrong side of the win-loss column in any rivalry, talk is cheap.
That’s for teams who have lost a couple in a row and are looking to get back on track and teams like the Kansas Jayhawks, who have lost 17 consecutive games to in-state rival Kansas State and are desperate to end the madness.
KU’s next chance to bring joy to their crimson-and-blue-clad fans who have caught hell from their K-State friends for nearly 2 decades straight, comes this weekend, when Leipold and company travel down I-70 to Manhattan for an 11 a.m. kickoff on Saturday at Bill Snyder Family Stadium.
And while KU coach Lance Leipold will be the first to tell you that it’s action and preparation and planning and production, not talk, that will determine how good KU’s chances of winning this week truly are, there’s still an element of understanding that is important in these rivalry conversations.
On Monday, almost five days to the minute before Saturday’s kickoff, Leipold took time to explain what he had learned during his first five tries in this series, all of them KU losses.
Because the losses have continued to mount and because Leipold has remained consistent in his program’s approach to each week of each season, the 6th-year KU head coach has drawn criticism from some fans for not caring enough about the Sunflower Showdown.
Remember, the bar in this rivalry was set by Snyder decades ago, when he mandated that his assistant coaches spent at least part of every day of the year working on something to do with the KU-K-State game.
So, it’s not an easy bar for anyone to climb over. But Leipold insisted Monday that not caring has nothing to do with it.
“I’ve tried to balance that through the years,” Leipold began. “We know what this game is. I think sometimes (people) take it as, ‘Well, he doesn’t care about the game or the program doesn’t care about the game.’ We know what the game is. We’re not stupid. Some people think I’m stupid in a lot of other areas, probably, but we know what it is.”
A recap of KU-KSU clashes in the Leipold Era...
2025 - K-State 42, Kansas 17 – The game opened with a bang, with KU forcing a KSU fumble on the opening kickoff. But it was all doom and gloom from there for the home team on a rainy day inside the newly opened David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium.
2024 - No. 16 K-State 29, Kansas 27 - The Wildcats needed a 51-yard field goal with under 2 minutes to play to extend their winning streak in the series to 16 straight games. For the second straight year, the Jayhawks had K-State in their grasp but found a way to lose. With KU leading by one late in the game, QB Jalon Daniels fumbled with 3:44 to play, giving the ball back to the Wildcats for their game-winning drive.
2023 - No. 21 K-State 31, No. 25 Kansas 27 - With true freshman walk-on Cole Ballard starting at QB — and playing admirably in a huge moment — the Jayhawks led 27-16 in the second half and were inches away from making it 34-16 when linebacker Rich Miller dropped a sure-fire, pick-6 interception. On the next play, the Wildcats went for 52 yards, which helped wrestle away the momentum and aided a late K-State rally to win.
2022 - No. 12 K-State 47, Kansas 27 – The Wildcats rolled out to a 23-7 lead at the end of the 1st quarter and never looked back from there, punching their ticket to the Big 12 title game with a resounding win over their in-state rival in the final regular season game of the season.
2021 - K-State 35, Kansas 10 – Leipold’s first KU team, which finished the season 2-10, fell to the Wildcats in early November, with KSU roaring out to a 28-3 lead behind two of the three rushing touchdowns scored by K-State great Deuce Vaughn.
Not every KU coach has been in quite the same position as Leipold, and certainly not as often.
Because of his early success at KU and the fact that he rescued the program from rudderless to relevant, the expectation became that it was just a matter of time before KU beat K-State again. And, frankly, there were at least a couple of games when they should’ve.
But they didn’t. Still. And so the conversation continues, through coaching changes and roster turnover, from one season to the next. Until it happens.
Even after getting absolutely rocked at home last week by 22nd-ranked Houston, the Wildcats (3-2 overall and 0-2 Big 12) once again are favored in this year’s matchup. The line opened with Kansas State as a 7.5-point favorite and, somewhat surprisingly, fell fast to KSU by 4.5 by mid-day Monday.
So, yeah. The expectation, at least in the eyes of the gambling world and probably thousands of people across the state, is that K-State will run its winning streak to 18 straight on Saturday afternoon.
And if that happens, Leipold and the KU program will head home disappointed and likely lamenting another lost opportunity. But if that’s the way the cards fall on Saturday, it won’t be, Leipold said, because his program doesn’t care.
“I’ve always tried to say you’ve gotta line up the next week and you’ve gotta prepare,” he explained of his heavy reliance on week-to-week consistency. “There’s not a winning-week practice formula and a losing-week practice formula. There’s not. So, when you look to be a consistent, winning football program you have to keep driving that home in how you go about it.”
If there’s an area where that approach falls short, —and, remember, it has served Leipold very well during his 20-year head coaching career — it’s in emphasizing this game’s importance.
He knows what’s at stake. He knows how rivalries work. And he knows the recent lopsided nature of the Sunflower Showdown.
“What I’ve done a poor job of, obviously, is not probably giving enough credence (to) what it means to a lot of people outside of this building,” the KU coach said Monday. “And it does. There’s a lot of bragging rights and pride and things that go back and forth and that’s in all sports across our athletic department. I don’t want to minimize it, and we understand it’ll be a great environment and we need to go play well.”
For themselves, for their fans, for the season and for the sake of the rivalry.
Saturday’s game, which will give one of these teams their first conference victory of the season, will be televised on FS1.
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