Lance Leipold has just begun his fifth season as kingpin of the gridiron at the University of Kansas, and he is off to a hot start. Kansas has already notched dominant wins over Fresno State and Wagner, with a combined margin of victory of sixty-three points.
This Jayhawks squad will unquestionably endure its toughest test to date when they travel to Columbia to take on Missouri on Saturday, September 6th. Even after that contest, the season will be fresh, and there will be a lot more football to play.
Can the Jayhawks successfully navigate through the thick of it? Could they potentially capture their first Big-12 title in program history? Will they get their introduction to the College Football Playoff? These are all questions that won't have an answer until December, but we can always speculate.
Football Hall of Famer, Champ Bailey, professed his high hopes for KU during a segment on TNT's Big-12 postgame show on Saturday night. The crew started dishing out hot takes for the budding college football season when Bailey stepped up to the microphone. He claimed that he believes two schools from the conference will make this year's College Football Playoff, those two universities being Arizona State (reigning Big-12 Champions) and Kansas.
The ESPN 2025 College Football Power Index was recently released, and it has KU ranked as the #25 team in the nation. Not only does it rank teams, but it also gives projections for how every program's season will turn out. After the Jayhawks' first two games, the index gives KU a 94.5% chance of hitting the six-win requirement to appear in a bowl game. It also gives Kansas an 11.7% chance of capturing the Big-12 Championship title, and an encouragingly even greater chance of making the 12-team College Football Playoff, with the current odds listed at 14.6%. It also predicts KU to finish the season with a record of 8-4, the same regular-season record that KU achieved in 2023 prior to defeating UNLV in the Guaranteed Rate Bowl.
When taking a look at the current odds for the Jayhawks' five most crucial games from the ESPN Analytics matchup predictor (different from the FPI), it is apparent that all five could truly swing either way. The forecasting tool gives Kansas a 36% chance to beat Missouri this Saturday, the lowest percentage that it gives the Jayhawks to win a game all season. It then gives KU a nearly even 49.6% chance to prevail on the road in Lubbock at Texas Tech on Saturday, October 11th. Next, the matchup predictor presents Leipold's legion with a 59.6% chance to defeat K-State on Saturday, October 25th. After three straight wins against Iowa State, the predictor tool only gives the Hawks a 42.8% chance of victory in Ames over the Cyclones. It rounds out the regular season by offering KU a 51.2% chance at success on senior night against Utah. Other than Missouri, Texas Tech, and Iowa State, the ESPN Analytics matchup predictor favors the Jayhawks in every other game this season.
Obviously, nothing is guaranteed or possible to correctly foresee, and anything could happen between now and bowl season, but coaching, execution, and toughness will undoubtedly prevail in the end, and these are all principles that Lance Leipold has built this program on. The beginning of the season is a time of uncertainty, one that allows teams to figure out who they are, but one thing is clear to the country and the computers, and it is that Kansas Jayhawks football is trending up and not looking back.