Kansas Basketball won't be scheduling Mizzou Tigers or Wichita State

The Kansas basketball is playing the Mizzou Tigers Sunday in the Spring Center in a charitable exhibition for hurricane relief.

The exhibition between the Kansas basketball team and the Mizzou Tigers has caused a huge ripple of excitement, not only in Lawrence, Kansas and Columbia, Missouri but Kansas City as well.

As fun as this match-up might be, nothing has changed overall – the Kansas Jayhawks aren’t going to thaw on their stance about scheduling the Mizzou Tigers or the Wichita State Shockers.

Finding a way to put this game together was a brilliant move by Bill Self and Cuonzo Martin. The athletic directors and their departments handled the details but let’s face the facts. This doesn’t happen without Self and Martin pushing it through.

While this event will help raise a lot of money for a worthy cause, cynically speaking, this game is significantly beneficial to both programs significantly, regardless of the outcome.

The Kansas basketball team plays Kentucky on November 14, with only exhibitions against Pittsburg State and Fort Hays State, plus a barely-more-than-a-scrimmage match-up against Tennessee State in which to prepare.

While the crowd in Allen Fieldhouse is always a rowdy bunch, playing on a neutral sold out court, where half the people will be adamantly against you, can’t be duplicated. The Sprint Center will have a raucous atmosphere Sunday, a veritable cacophony that will cascade over the players on the court.

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What better way for Bill Self to train his relatively inexperienced team than throwing them into that situation against a team that desperately wants to beat them?

For the Mizzou Tigers, a win in this game, despite the exhibition nature of it, could launch this program back into the national spotlight. The move to the SEC hasn’t been kind to the Tigers in basketball. They have won just 28 conference games in fives years, and only eight in the last three seasons.

With the arrival of Martin and Michael Porter, Jr in Columbia, there is new hope the Tigers can reclaim some of their past glories on the hardwood. What better way to gain confidence than to beat the third-ranked Kansas Jayhawks!

A victory over KU would certainly revitalize and boost interest in the Mizzou basketball program. It would get people back into the seats and talking about the team with a new sense of excitement that has been missing in recent years.

This brings us back to why Bill Self and his Kansas basketball team won’t be scheduling Mizzou or Wichita State anytime soon. There just isn’t much of an advantage for the Jayhawks to play those teams.

Of course, as college basketball fans, we want to see these games. If an exhibition between Kansas and Missouri can stir up so many emotions and passions, imagine the interest a regular season tilt would generate.

Sure, playing big names like Kentucky, Syracuse, and Stanford is exciting but wouldn’t it be more titillating locally to play Missouri and Wichita State? Sure it would – for the fans. For the Kansas basketball program, not so much.

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There is a valid argument here that if you are Kansas, and you consider yourself to be a national powerhouse, it shouldn’t matter who you play, or where you play them. There is truth in that, but when you are talking playing teams like the Tigers and the Shockers, things are a bit different.

When talking about KU and Mizzou, there were few heated rivalries in the nation bigger than this one. The schools really hate one another, and it goes back some 160 years. For these two to play now, they would either have to agree to a home and home exchange (can’t see this ever happening) or schedule a yearly clash in the Sprint Center (more realistic).

If Kansas beats Missouri, and most years, including this one, they should, it is no big deal. The Jayhawks took care of business. If the Tigers beat KU however, at this point and time, it would be a huge feather in their caps.

The same goes for any possible games between KU and Wichita State. There is no obvious neutral place to play because it is doubtful the Shockers would consider the Sprint Center neutral. There is no way Bill Self would ever take his team to play in Koch Arena, and who could blame him?

No other big school will either. Who would want to? The Shockers are almost as good in Koch Arena as the Jayhawks are in Allen Fieldhouse.

All of the advantages of a possible KU vs. WSU matchup lie with the Shockers. While most fans would love to see this series revived, a home and home scenario just isn’t one in which Bill Self would place his team.

As fans, we want to see games with natural rivals. It is agonizing to lose and exhilarating to win, for players as well as the fans. Coaches have to look at what’s best for their teams in the long run. Sometimes that means a schedule full of cupcakes with a few big games sprinkled in until they get to conference play.

We may not like it, but it isn’t changing anytime soon.

Enjoy the game Sunday if you are lucky enough to see it. It may be a while before you witness the Kansas basketball team play the Mizzou Tigers, or the Wichita State Shockers, again, unless they meet in the NCAA Tournament at some point.

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Kansas Basketball: Don’t look for Jayhawks to schedule Mizzou or Wichita State

By Joel Wagler | Oct 21, 2017

The Kansas basketball is playing the Mizzou Tigers Sunday in the Spring Center in a charitable exhibition for hurricane relief.

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