Kansas Jayhawk News
While the men’s team saw their season end on Sunday, the Lady Jayhawks are still alive in the WBIT:
“Getting one more game is really important to us,” Kansas head coach Brandon Schneider said after the game. “We want to play well, we want to advance in this tournament and we want to represent Kansas in the best fashion we can. I thought we rebounded well tonight and won the free throw battle.”
With the win, Kansas advances to the WBIT quarterfinals and will host San Diego State on Thursday, March 26,
at 6:30 p.m. CT. Kansas improves to 21-13 this season, including a 14-4 mark at home, while Rice’s season ends at 29-6.
KCTV5 also has a story on the women’s team as they get set to host the #4 seed San Diego at Allen Fieldhouse on Thursday:
The Jayhawks fell just short of a bid to the NCAA Tournament this year, which means they’re one of the highest-seeded teams in the WBIT. As a 2-seed, they get the privilege of hosting games.
A 62-55 victory over Rice in the second round on Sunday punched their ticket to the Quarterfinals.
Jayhawk baseball is off to a decent start with two sweeps on the season already, the most recent a conference sweep over Houston. They’re hosting Sacramento State in a 2 game midweek series.
Kansas (15-8, 4-2 Big 12) is riding a season-best five-game winning streak after sweeping Houston this past weekend. The Jayhawks have scored 57 runs over the five games and have scored at least eight runs in all five games.
I tried to link to some Kansas softball news but ran into the paywall on KU Sports. I do believe they have the most restrictive paywall on the Internet. I didn’t want to link to them anyway. On the other hand, the Daily Kansan does a good job of covering all things KU and had an update on a tennis win:
Kansas tennis notched another upset win on Friday when it knocked off No. 40 Houston in nailbiting fashion, beating the Cougars 4-3. As she continues to return to form following her injury, Kansas star Kyoka Kubo led the charge for the Jayhawks in the win.
Sticking with the Kansan for one more story, a column on the only question that matters for the Jayhawks heading towards the offseason:
But the possibility of Self leaving — and Kansas entering the search for what would be only the ninth coach in program history — hangs over the program and casts a larger shadow than it likely ever has before.
One last KU link and to a Winners and Losers from the first weekend of the tournament and you can probably guess what section we’re in:
Kansas as a team hasn’t been good enough in a couple of seasons. It’s been three years since the Jayhawks finished as a top-20 team on KenPom. They finished 27th in 2024 after starting the season ranked second. They dropped from a no. 7 preseason ranking down to no. 24 in 2025. This season, they started at no. 21 and that’s where they currently sit after Sunday’s season-ender. Self is still one of the top coaches in the country, but the program has fallen into a rut, and its performance in the transfer portal is the main culprit for the stagnation.
Other Links!
Thank god I was flying last week because I missed most of the backups at the airports. And it does appear as though the Senate may be close to passing something to end the shutdown that is affecting TSA:
If Senate Democrats do agree, it could put Congress on a path to ending the nearly 40-day shutdown of DHS that has left federal workers, like TSA officers, without pay. The funding deal would still need to go to the House, where GOP leaders would need to navigate a tight majority. Then Republicans would face an arduous few weeks crafting another major immigration bill — with both ICE funding and pieces of Trump’s contentious voter ID bill — all just months before a critical midterm election.
As we move on from basketball season, I really enjoyed this piece by Ben Lindbergh at The Ringer on keeping the front offices in MLB as far away from the playing field as possible:
The ump ambled over, asked for the offending piece of paper, and confiscated it, on the grounds that the card constituted a foreign substance. Phillies manager Gabe Kapler, who had introduced scouting cards to the team that season, came out to argue, but Cowboy Joe stuck to his guns, telling Davis, “You can have it back after the game, but you can’t have it now.”
Another good read from the last week is from Scott Hines over at Action Cookbook with some reflections on Covid and some of the crazier things we all did:
Instead, I want to talk about the dumbest and/or most manic things I did in reaction to this world-changing event–an event I was confident in real time that I was dealing with well, and one that I can tell with the benefit of retrospect I absolutely was not dealing with well.
By the way, reading that over the weekend made me realize that we’re already memory holing that entire time aren’t we? The last few years it seemed like everyone looked back on it and at least discussed it somewhat but that’s the first time it popped into my mind this year.
QOTD: With the basketball season more or less finished for most of us, what sport or activity gets your attention now? We’ve spent months investing time and energy into the Jayhawks only to fall far short of the goal once again so we have to fill that void somehow. For me, next up is The Masters. I’m a Royals fan so I’ll be watching them but it’s tough to get excited about anything that happens in April, especially as a Royals fan. The Masters though? Major golf is one of the best sporting events there is these days and I can’t wait.
