Kansas

Kansas is one of college basketball's holy sites. Naismith himself coached in Lawrence. The banners in Allen Fieldhouse are the institution's self-image — and for most of a century, the football program lived as the Tuesday obligation the other sport tolerated. Then came the 2007 season, a 12-1 record, an Orange Bowl win, and a brief, luminous proof that Lawrence could love football too. Then the fall. Then over a decade of double-digit losses before Lance Leipold arrived and started the process again.

The Leipold revival ran through Jalon Daniels — six seasons, the program's second all-time leader in passing yards and touchdowns, Heisman buzz in 2023 that made Kansas football a real sentence in the national conversation for the first time since Mark Mangino. The 2025 season was Daniels's farewell: a 5-7 finish, a second straight bowl miss, a final game loss to Utah where he threw three interceptions and left with the program still searching for the new normal after him. Daniels goes down as the face of the revival. The revival's durability is now Leipold's open question.

The 2026 season is football's most honest referendum in Lawrence in a generation: does the Daniels era represent a new floor for Kansas football, or was it the peak of a borrowed moment in a basketball town? Gale Sayers came from here. The Orange Bowl trophy exists. The argument for football mattering in Lawrence has real evidence. Leipold has to find it again without the player who made it legible for three years.