The Kansas football team finished the 2025 season with five wins and seven losses. Under most circumstances, schools need six wins to be bowl-eligible. This year, because of eligible teams scorning their earned bowls, some five-win teams were offered the opportunity to play another game.
Kansas was one of those schools and, disappointingly, turned down the chance for a bowl game. While there were reasons why backing into a bowl may have caused KU to reject the chance to play another game, the benefits certainly would have outweighed those.
The Kansas football team is nowhere near in a place where it should be turning down extra exposure or the opportunity to give players more game experience. This isn't like Notre Dame turning down a bowl in a fit of petulance over not making the playoffs, or even like K-State, which is going through a coaching change.
Why would the Kansas football team spurn a bowl, and what are the benefits if they'd accepted?
The Kansas football season ended, for all practical purposes, after their heartbreaking loss to Utah on November 30. That game and the one two weeks before that one, against Arizona, were both emotional outings where Kansas gave the games away at the end.
The Jayhawks may have spent so much of their emotions on those losses, trying to earn a legitimate bowl appearance, that when they failed, there might not have been anything else left. That is a plausible theory for any players whose eligibility expired. It would be tough to ask someone like Jalon Daniels to suit up one more time in a meaningless game.
It would have been beneficial for those Kansas players who are still in the program with eligibility left. The extra weeks of preparation, practice, and game experience would have helped those players for next year.
Take the quarterbacks, for instance. Giving Isaiah Marshall, Cole Ballard, and maybe even David McComb extra snaps in practice and in a game would certainly help next year's team. The same theory could be applied for any position.
KU is a program that needs to continually improve, and you do that by gaining more experience. Turning down an extra two-plus weeks of practice and a game just seems shortsighted for the coaches and players.
It is quite possible the coaches brought the possibility of a bowl game to the players, and they turned it down. Maybe they wanted to put this season behind them, or already had, and didn't want to go back to the practice field after being done for more than a week. Perhaps the players didn't feel they earned it.
There are several possible reasons not to accept a bowl bid with a 5-7 record, but the benefits of playing seem to outweigh those for a program like Kansas'. This seems like a lost opportunity.