Allen Fieldhouse is Kansas’ bread and butter.
Sure, most home arenas are like that, but for the Jayhawks, it can take what looks like a down KU team and flip them into superstars in 40 minutes. Look at the 2025-26 season. Kansas had just started 1-2 in Big 12 play and had fully fallen out of the scope of college basketball.
All of a sudden, KU welcomed No. 2 Iowa State inside AFH and turned a dominant 84-63 win over the Cyclones into an eight-game winning streak that included five wins at home.
But today, we are taking the Jayhawks away from home and instead analyzing each away game they play this season, and ranking them in order from the perceived easiest to hardest.
No. 10 Utah (January 6th)
The Utes will be losing their top three scorers from last season. Terrence Brown made the move to the UNC Tar Heels. Dom McHenry exhausted his eligibility, and Keanu Dawes left Utah to join the Jayhawks. Combine that with the fact that this is only Alex Jensen’s second season as head coach and it gets harder to find why they should be any higher.
No. 9 TCU (February 24th)
Jamie Dixon is in the midst of rebuilding a roster that lost two elite players in forward David Punch and Liutauras Lelevicius. With No. 1 JUCO recruit Trent Lincoln and small forward Ricards Aizpurs, expected to become key pieces, as a part of a seven-man class, you aren’t wrong to have questions over the capabilities of this team, even if this was a Dixon that pushed KU to the wire last season.
No. 8 Kansas State (January 23rd)
For new head coach Casey Alexander, this is likely the biggest game of his debut campaign. This is a roster reeling in 12 new players from the high school and portal ranks. With this being still towards the front-end of conference play beginning, there is a good chance this is a Wildcat team still shaking itself out.
No. 7 Cincinnati (January 19th)
Utah State has developed a stellar pipeline of coaches, Jerrod Calhoun being the latest. The former Bob Huggins assistant did tremendous work last season, leading the Aggies to the second round of the NCAA Tournament while putting up as good as a fight you could ask for against the Arizona Wildcats.
The biggest “but” about this team is that it is only year one under Calhoun, and if we are going to punish teams for being transfer-laden, this Bearcats team could have 13 transfers on the court next season.
No. 6 Baylor (March 6th)
The more we look at this, maybe Baylor is too low. Since the 2010-11 campaign, Baylor has only finished under 20 wins three times under Scott Drew, with the latest coming this past season. However, Drew has impressively reeled in 5-star Dylan Mingo, along with his brother Kayden, who averaged 13.7 points last season at Penn State. Small forward Isaac Celiscar from Yale is also a sneaky-good pickup. Suddenly this team may fit higher in this list.
No. 5 BYU (January 9th)
This ranking may very well be feeling the pressure of a CBS Sports article that ranked this the third-biggest game of the Big 12 season. Nonetheless, the Cougars are reeling in the nation’s No. 6 player from the class of 2026 in Bruce Branch III; combine that with Michigan State transfer Jaxon Kohler that KU was heavily linked with, and it's clear they have proper talent. Oh, and the last time Kansas traveled to Provo, Utah, it ended with a 91-57 loss.
No. 4 Iowa State (February 13th)
T.J. Otzelberger has always been able to avoid whatever injury/talent crisis is thrown his way. And while this isn’t an Iowa State team that has been able to reach the Final Four recently like everyone else above them on this list, inside Hilton Coliseum, the Cyclones went 16-1 last season, 15-2 the season before that, and 18-0 the season before that. Are you catching the drift?
No. 3 Arizona (February 20th)
The former Gonzaga coach in waiting finds a way to impress every single year. Lloyd’s ability to poach some of the top young international talent, while also keeping pipelines in the states wide open, has reached a new high this season. According to 247Sports, the Wildcats are reeling in 5-star and No. 3 player Caleb Holt, 4-star and No. 36 overall player Cameron Holmes, along with two 4-star international talents in center Endurance Aiyamenkhue and power forward Maksim Brnovic. That isn’t even including the transfers RJ Godfrey and Derek Dixon who headlined that transfer class.
No. 2 Houston (February 1st)
You could make an argument, this is both too high and too low. When the Cougars aren’t on it, Kelvin Sampson’s team often finds themselves on the losing end, afterall, they did go 6-3 in true road games last season. But this isn’t on the road, which means 99% of the time, they will showcase an ability to either grind a team down before taking over in the final few minutes, or be able to score with the best of them. Either way, the Fertitta Center has seen one of the quickest turnarounds from a near-empty arena when Sampson first joined, into one of the games most hostile environments.
No.1 UConn (December 12th)
Whether you love him or not, Dan Hurley is the game’s most consistent coach right now. To put it simply, he knows how to eke out results like no one else. And we can go beyond the Braylon Mullins prayer last season; heck, we can look at when the Huskies beat Kansas inside AFH last season and see the definition of a Dan Hurley 61-56 win. This is a talented UConn team that retained Mullins and brought in Duke small forward Nikolas Khamenia, Seton Hall center Najai Hines, two top-50 high school recruits in Colben Landrew and Junior County. Solo Ball and Silas Demary Jr. are still onboardl. This is a loaded roster once again.
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