Many Kansas Jayhawks fans and college football fans alike were excited to hear the news that KU Football is heading to London to face off with the Arizona State Sun Devils next season. How fun, right? Not only this, but Wembley Stadium will be hosting its first-ever college (American) football game:
Wembley Stadium will host its first college football game.
— Front Office Sports (@FOS) September 18, 2025
Arizona State and Kansas will play in the inaugural Union Jack Classic on Sept. 19, 2026 in London. pic.twitter.com/Tz7ruCX6s4
While on paper, this feels like it is a great idea and incredibly valuable for Kansas, both from a marketing standpoint and recruiting standpoint, there are also some hesitations about how this will impact Kansas’ season next year… queue up the Flynn Rider unpopular opinion meme, but this is a terrible idea for KU from a football standpoint.
The National Football League (NFL) has been sending teams abroad to London since 2007 as part of their “NFL International Series”. The first NFL game took place between the future Super Bowl champions that season in the New York Giants and the Miami Dolphins, with the Giants winning 13-10. Recently, the NFL has pushed games to other places as well, with various amounts of success.
While some NFL players have given the London trips positive feedback, many players also mentioned how they disliked the huge time-zone change, the disruptive and fatiguing travel, and the massive change in routine that is associated with going to London to play a single game. These are all concerns for KU Football next season now too… Let’s break them down.
A “Life-changing experience” aside, the potential negatives are daunting for KU
Kansas most recently faced off with Arizona State last season, losing a nail-biter and back-and-forth game to the Sun Devils 35-31. The next time they face will now be at Wembley Stadium, a place where neither team will have much of a home-field advantage. On top of that, the 6(ish) time-zone change is going to make for a very interesting experience.
If this game were taking place at the very beginning of the football season, it may also be a bit less jarring. Sadly, with the game taking place on September 19th, that is likely to be 3-4 games into the season and will definitely disrupt the flow of the season for better or worse.
On top of the traveling disruption and jet-lag concerns, Kansas will also be starting a QB next year that has far less experience than Jalon Daniels. With younger QBs (or newer QBs to your system), allowing them to stick to a routine and fall back on consistency is a big asset. With this trip to Europe now planned, KU’s future starting QB won’t have a routine to fall back on here.
Lastly, there have been concerns about the London field conditions in the past when it pertained to handling NFL games. Most notably, Buffalo Bills players ripped the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, also located in London, calling it “one of the worst surfaces [they had] ever played on”. The worst-case scenario would be that a beloved Jayhawk gets injured due to a subpar field for college football action.
Time will tell how this trip treats the Jayhawks and if the eventual benefits outweigh the concerns, but it certainly is not all sunshines and rainbows like some KU fans may claim when hearing this news.