86 Days Until Kansas Football: Way Too Early Predictions - Late Conference Games
We've gotten to the end of our series where I make wildly irresponsible predictions about the games on the Kansas Jayhawk football schedule nearly 3 months before the start of the season.
A reminder that for these predictions, we will be looking at ESPN's FPI Rankings. For reference, the Kansas Jayhawks rank 97th coming into this season, while they ended last season ranked 114th.
Make sure you catch up on the non-conference game predictions the first three conference games and the middle three conference games as well.
at Texas Tech (48)
Everything is new for Texas Tech and first year head coach Joey McGuire, but one of the biggest thing that can help the Red Raiders will be a reversal of injury luck.
While it's obviously not true that injuries accounted for ALL of the problems for under Matt Wells, it is true that multiple seasons were made more difficult by injuries to key players, including Tyler Shough last season.
If the Jayhawks are going to pull off some upsets, this is one of the best spots available. Call me a hopeless homer, but it feels like this is one where they pull it off.
Prediction: Kansas 34, Texas Tech 31
vs Texas (6)
This game is all about the memes. Much like it took someone knocking off Kansas basketball multiple years for me to not just believe that Kansas basketball was a shoe-in for the conference title, I refuse to believe that Texas is back until Texas actually proves that they are back.
The Longhorns have a quarterback battle on their hands, and they have a lot of players to replace after the disaster that was last season. Sure they brought in a ton of highly rated talent, but the question is always how well they put it together.
Texas just seems to be one of those teams that the Jayhawks play well against, for whatever reason. As much as I want to take back to back years of upsets over the Longhorns, I just can't do it.
Prediction: Texas 57, Kansas 54
at Kansas State (39)
There are two things that you can be certain of when it comes to Kansas State football: great special teams and a solid quarterback that Wildcat fans think is much better than he actually is.
Adrian Martinez steps right in as the next prototypical KSU QB. His numbers at Nebraska were ... not great. While it's fair to assign some of the blame on the rest of the team around him, you can't ignore that he played poorly in quite a few games. And given that one of the biggest issues that Kansas State had last season was the lack of skill position talent outside of Deuce Vaughn (a problem that really isn't that much better this year), it's hard to see how much better things get for him this year.
The one thing that makes this difficult is the strength of the Kansas State defense, especially on the line. I expect this to be a hard fought game, but ultimately, with this one in Manhattan, it's hard to pull the trigger on the Kansas upset.
Prediction: Kansas State 27, Kansas 24
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