Kansas Jayhawk News
Ben Hooke at the Daily Kansan has some thoughts on the Jayhawks showing in London:
When a band takes its show on a world tour, there are some common benchmarks for a successful international show. Did the band bring the established pageantry associated with it? Did they subtly add nods to local tradition? Were there unique things for hardcore fans who made the long trip? Most importantly, did they play the crucial, in-the-DNA hits?
Judging against these benchmarks, the Wembley Stadium debut for Lance
Leipold and the Kansas Jayhawks against Arizona State on Saturday couldn’t have gone better.
With the football team on a bye week, we’re going to stick with the Daily Kansan for a few more stories. First up, the baseball team coming off one of their best seasons in history has the top ranked JUCO class according to JBB(?):
The JBB ranked Kansas as the No. 1 JUCO recruiting class for 2026 on Monday.
Per the JBB, 19 JUCO recruits made it to campus for Kansas’ 2026 fall season. Fall practices are already underway, and the Jayhawks have their first exhibition game on Saturday, Oct. 3, vs. Illinois State at Hoglund Ballpark.
The volleyball team hosted Grand Canyon State on Sunday and pulled off the sweep and remaining undefeated at home this season:
Similar to Friday’s game against Ole Miss, Kansas dominated the third set. The Jayhawks built an early lead and never looked back.
With Kansas’ net defense at its best, Grand Canyon’s offense couldn’t find its rhythm, falling short against blocks from Stanley, Aiono and pin hitter Grace Nelson.
The Jayhawks won the third set 25-15 on a kill from Ptacek to improve their record to 7-3 for the season and a perfect 5-0 at home.
Sticking with volleyball, freshman Taylor Stanley was named both Big 12 Rookie and Offensive Player of the Week:
Freshman pin hitter Taylor Stanley was named Big 12 Offensive Player and Rookie of the Week, the conference announced on Tuesday. The award marks the second of her career and the second-straight week as Rookie of the Week. Reese Messer was also named to the Big 12 Starting Seven.
I watch quite a bit of volleyball but this is the first I’ve heard of “pin hitter”, anyone else?
Joel Wagler at Through the Phog writes about the disappointing home schedule for the men’s basketball team:
Unfortunately for Kansas fans, not many of these games will be played at Allen Fieldhouse. In fact, the most attractive home games are a pair of exhibition outings against Louisville on October 25, and Duke on November 2.
Other Links!
This sounds like a bad thing as Kalshi will allow some action with borrowed funds:
Kalshi will let users juice their bets with borrowed money — but only some, showing where the prediction-markets platform thinks its future lies. Kalshi asked the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to let it extend margin loans to customers, but is excluding sports, mentions, and culture bets from the product. That leaves the categories most attractive to institutional investors looking to wager on, or protect themselves from, big global events like elections and commodity prices.
Just wait until somebody with Scrooge McDuck type money (LeBron) starts promoting this. I don’t get it.
The NY Times has a glowing press release write up on Muse, Facebook’s new AI “agent” that can do all sorts of things for you. If there’s one tech company you can trust to not completely screw you over, it’s probably Meta…
Muse is the first consumer A.I. agent from a major tech company that has become publicly available. The tech industry sees agents as the next frontier, far more capable than chatbots. Agents can roam the internet, sign in to websites, fill out spreadsheets and make phone calls on behalf of people — and that’s just the start.
This is an older post from Don Moynihan that talks about the disconnect we see in the media and from politicians when it comes to trying to accomplish specific acts:
This makes investing their time in the details of government a relatively poor bet for politicians. The details are too wonky, administrative processes are difficult to explain, the time required to master the topic is too great, the time required to see results is too long, and the potential for failure is high. All of this makes a political payoff is too unlikely.
I don’t agree with everything in there but it’s fairly thought provoking.
As a Royals fan, this video from Baseball America caught my eye as it discusses the importance of Top 100 prospects for MLB organizations.
Circling back to the topic of gambling, Tom Ley at Defector writes about what Draft Kings and Fan Duel are relying on from gamblers:
The footage of Ruiz-Haynes gambling in his home is unbelievably depressing, as is the idea that DraftKings is making billions of dollars every year from people who are sitting on their couches playing a slot machine on their phones. You can get bogged down all you want in arguing the ethics of how companies like DraftKings and FanDuel find and retain customers, but there’s no denying what their success and profitability requires. It requires a 29-year-old with a good job spending his Saturday locked inside his completely barren apartment, watching football games on his TV and phone, agonizing over the bad decisions he’s made. It requires millions of people around the country to be all alone, staring into the glow of their phone screens, hoping for a good spin.
QOTD: We’re basically 3/4 of the way through 2026, how has the year treated you? Anything you’ve got circled that will be a highlight of 2026 over the next 3 months?
