AP Photo/Sam Hodde

The color guard rehearses on the field before the First Responder Bowl NCAA college football game between Utah State and Memphis on Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2022, in Dallas.

The Kansas football program has a major hurdle to overcome if it wants to reach a third straight bowl game for the first time ever: beating a Baylor team in a stadium where the Jayhawks have never won.

If they do that, no one can guess what the month of December will bring.

Due to the new 12-team College Football Playoff format, a possible preponderance of bowl-eligible teams, and a relatively small number of games with Big 12-specific tie-ins – two of which have already been selected in recent years – A 6-6 KU team could play at any number of times in any number of places.

In fact, the Jayhawks could even be eliminated from the postseason altogether in a number of ways.

How they could be left out if they win at Baylor: There are 35 non-playoff FBS bowl games, so 70 teams, plus 12 more teams going to the playoffs, meaning there are potentially 82 postseason spots for bowl-eligible programs. 77 teams have already reached the threshold of six wins. Of the 16 current five-win teams, Virginia and Virginia Tech are playing each other, as are Eastern Michigan and Western Michigan, meaning 79 are guaranteed to achieve bowl eligibility. That means as many as nine of the 12 remaining teams could get six wins and still be out of a postseason berth.

Granted, a 6-6 KU squad entering the postseason with a four-game winning streak, a large fan base and a fair amount of national attention would apparently be a pretty attractive pick for many bowl committees, so maybe the Jayhawks wouldn’t In such a scenario, we are not on the chopping block.

How they could be left out if they lose: This might be a bit more obvious; However, teams with 5-7 records have been known to occasionally earn bowl berths when there is a lack of bowl-eligible options (which has been far from rare in recent years). For the reasons mentioned above, this does not seem particularly likely this year. For example, even if all 12 additional teams lose and there are still three open spots left, the three teams that fill those spots will likely be as in past years and in most cases based on the Academic Progress Rate (APR) metric NCAA Selected Based on current APR data available online at the NCAA website, KU performs worse than most teams it would be compared to.

Suppose KU makes some kind of bowl

Because of its recent winning streak, KU now appears in bowl predictions compiled by national college football experts, although it has yet to emerge from a game it is most likely to win – after Baylor entered the game as the favorite – to even become an option. Out of a sample of nine projectors, two, Erick Smith of USA Today and Steven Lassan of Athlon Sports, omitted KU entirely, perhaps feeling some uncertainty about that outcome.

The rest have the Jayhawks in all sorts of places: two in the Birmingham Bowl, two in the Independence Bowl, one in the First Responder Bowl, one in the Frisco Bowl and one in the Rate Bowl.

The first thing you might notice if you’ve followed things like this over the years is that some of them aren’t even bowl games with specific Big 12 ties.

That’s likely because the Big 12 already has nine bowl-eligible teams and could get as many as two more if KU and Cincinnati both win this weekend (the Bearcats face TCU). On its 2024-25 bowl selection website, the Big 12 lists seven possible spots as well as additional opportunities to participate in “ESPN Events Pool Games” for its long-standing teams.

By the way, the four newcomers from the Pac-12 have their own six possible games that they share with their former league mates who are scattered in all directions. Two of the Big 12’s bowl-eligible teams, Arizona State and Colorado, are former Pac-12 members.

That means if KU and Cincinnati come into play, there could be as many as nine teams slated for seven Big 12 spots, potentially sending the lower-ranked contenders below them into the mystery ESPN Events games.

However, the consensus among bowl projectors like Action Network’s Brett McMurphy and The Athletic’s Scott Dochterman and Stewart Mandel seems to be that ESPN Events – the division of ESPN that owns and operates a total of 16 FBS bowl games – will have teams between its different competitions can move it chooses. That’s probably why McMurphy and Bill Bender of The Sporting News have KU playing Alabama against Oklahoma and Vanderbilt, respectively, in ESPN’s Birmingham Bowl, and CBS Sports’ Jerry Palm even has the Jayhawks playing OU in the Frisco Bowl in Texas, though In recent years, neither game has been able to boast an explicitly declared affiliation with the Big 12.

ESPN’s Mark Schlabach has KU in a game with a familiar Big 12 tie, the Dallas-area First Responder Bowl against Memphis. 247Sports’ Brad Crawford also opted for a standard Big 12 bowl by putting the Jayhawks in the Rate Bowl – but the catchy new name belies the fact that it’s the same Guaranteed Rate Bowl that KU last played in played against UNLV last year. (His proposed opponent this time is Rutgers.) That recent selection, as well as the fact that KU went to the Liberty Bowl in 2022, would appear to exclude the Jayhawks from consideration for two of the Big 12’s lower spots — presenting an additional projection challenge.

That might explain why Dochterman and Mandel, as well as ESPN’s Kyle Bonagura, placed KU in the Independence Bowl in Shreveport, Louisiana (against Army and Louisiana, respectively). This game was a direct tie to the Big 12 last year; The league sent Texas Tech. Now it’s part of the pool of former Pac-12 teams.

However, it’s not clear if there would even be room for KU in this game if it were an option; Remember, there are six former Pac-12 bowl ties not only for Arizona State and Colorado, but also for Oregon, USC, Washington, Washington State, etc. A lock for the CFP and ASU or CU could get it through the Win the Big 12 title.

All of this guesswork with minimal clarity represents a stark contrast to last season, when a week before the start of the regular season, the then-guaranteed Prize Bowl was a pretty clear favorite to serve as KU’s postseason destination.

Of course, even then, it was a surprise that the Jayhawks were facing UNLV and not, as expected, a team from the Big Ten Conference – a testament to the sheer unpredictability of college football’s postseason.

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Written by Henry Greenstein

Henry is a sports editor at the Lawrence Journal-World and KUsports.com and serves as a KU beat writer while managing daily sports coverage. He previously worked as a sports reporter at The Bakersfield Californian and is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis (BA, Linguistics) and Arizona State University (MA, Sports Journalism). Despite being from Los Angeles, he’s often been told that he doesn’t give off “California vibes,” whatever that means.

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