Here’s who Kansas and K-State will each play twice in Big 12 basketball next season
The Big 12 basketball schedule will look quite a bit different next season.
With four new members joining the conference we must say farewell to the double round-robin that has worked so well in the past. The days of everybody playing everybody twice are over.
In its place comes a new format that will give every team a set of five conference rivals that it will play twice (home and away), a set of four league foes that it will play once at home and another set of four opponents that it will play once on the road.
It will make for an unbalanced schedule, to be sure. But there is no alternative with the Big 12 ballooning to 14 members with BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and UCF coming on board before Oklahoma and Texas depart for the SEC.
The Big 12 hasn’t released a full conference schedule, but it has announced which opponents every team in the conference will play next season.
Let’s focus on the Kansas Jayhawks and the K-State Wildcats.
As you might have guessed, they will play each other twice next season like normal in the Sunflower Showdown.
Kansas was given a rather difficult set of home-and-away conference rivals for the 2023-24 season. The Jayhawks will play Baylor, Houston, K-State, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State twice.
The Bears and the Cougars have been national powers in recent years. The Wildcats are coming off a trip to the Elite Eight. Those six games won’t easy.
KU will also play road-only games against Iowa State, UCF, Texas Tech and West Virginia. It is a tad surprising that the Cyclones were left off the home-and-away rotation. But it makes sense that the conference would like to create extra games for KU and the other best teams in the league.
The Jayhawks will play home-only games against BYU, Cincinnati, TCU and Texas.
For the Wildcats, they will play home-and-away games against BYU, Iowa State, Kansas, Oklahoma State and West Virginia. The conference protected longtime rivalries with the Cyclones, Jayhawks and Cowboys. Perhaps playing BYU and West Virginia twice can make those games feel more like rivalries.
K-State will also play home only games against Baylor, Oklahoma, TCU and UCF. Its road only opponents will be Cincinnati, Houston, Texas and Texas Tech.
The conference did the Wildcats no favors with those road games, as they will have to travel into some of the best home-court environments in the conference next season.
This story was originally published July 20, 2023 at 3:09 PM with the headline "Here’s who Kansas and K-State will each play twice in Big 12 basketball next season."