100 Days to Kansas Football 2024: An Introduction

Today marks the beginning of one of the most ambitious and rewarding things we do here on Blue Wings Rising: the countdown to the beginning of the new football season. Every year, it is one of my favorite things, as it helps to explore a lot of the often forgotten areas of the team and address multiple topics. Plus, it helps me personally to stay engaged during a time where not much is going on in the world of college sports.

Since we launched the site in early 2022, we strove to continue a lot of the traditions from our prior coverage, and every year we have seen great results. In 2022, we were covering a team that had started to show positive results at the end of the prior year, but still had a long way to go. They took that huge leap forward in 2022, and the coverage going into 2023 was much more optimistic, given the return of such a large portion of the production.

Last year we looked to highlight players that often go unheralded, previewed every position and hit on some of the biggest players who wore numbers for the Jayhawks in history. We jumped into the film room and broke down multiple ideas for how the Jayhawks could add something new to their playbook. And of course we did our normal opponent previews and podcast episodes.

And now heading into 2024, we are preparing for what could be the most successful season in Kansas Football history, at least since the 2007-08 Orange Bowl season. Lance Leipold finds himself in a very familiar position: having lost a few key assistants just to plug them with new guys that have everyone really excited, losing multiple key defenders to the NFL and graduation, but hitting the transfer portal hard to get some promising replacements, and heading into the season with an offense that looks to be electric if it can avoid key injuries.

But even with so much known, there are still a lot of new things. Kansas will play their home games at Children's Mercy Sporting Park and Arrowhead Stadium while Memorial Stadium is under renovations. The Big 12 is saying goodbye to two big programs but welcoming in 4 new ones. We'll get to know them as Kansas plays Arizona and Colorado this season. And we have combined our player number ratings with everyone's favorite bracket-style game, looking to crown the best Kansas Football player of all time (so far).

We'll continue to hit all the breaking news and jump into any other topics that might affect the football team, and of course we will wrap it up with our traditional adaptation of a song/poem to help set the tone for the season. The first one we did was my favorite ever piece written, and the second one last year was an aspirational piece based on potential that wasn't quite realized. I'm already excited for the one I'm working on for this year and I can't wait for you to read it. So buckle in for the next 100 days. Gameday will be here before you know it.