The Kansas football program has added a nonconference road game at Nevada to its 2023 schedule to replace a home game with Houston, KU announced Tuesday morning.
The move, which was first reported by the Journal-World, is tied to Houston joining the Big 12 Conference in 2023. KU will play at Nevada on Sept. 16, 2023, and the Wolf Pack will return the game and play at Kansas during the 2029 season.
Originally scheduled in 2013, the home-and-home series with Houston will begin this season with KU traveling to Houston in Week 3.
With the Cougars joining the Big 12 next season and the 2023 conference schedule not yet set, it was going to be difficult for KU and Houston to complete the second leg of the series.
For one, the 2023 Big 12 schedule, when it’s released, could feature KU against Houston. For two, playing Houston in 2023 will no longer be a true nonconference game.
Because of that, KU needed to find a nonconference opponent to play early in the 2023 season.
“It’s simple,” KU Athletic Director Travis Goff told the Journal-World. “If you’ve got a home-and-home that’s no longer able to be executed, you do what you can to try and navigate out of that.”
Goff said KU looked into getting out of this year’s game with Houston but was unable to make it work.
A search for the 2023 replacement game began with a list of teams that would have been able to come to Lawrence. However, with schedules often put together far in advance, Goff said the list of potential opponents for next season was both short and unimpressive.
That led to Nevada of the Mountain West Conference, and Goff said KU was willing to play a Group of 5 opponent on the road next season for a number of reasons.
“This matchup just made sense,” Goff said. “And it made sense for Nevada, as well. We feel like (the 2023 KU) team’s going to be in a position to be able to go on the road with confidence, and Year 3 of the Lance Leipold era is different than Year 1 and even Year 2.”
Beyond that, Goff said it was “nice to have a good anchor Group of 5 program on the schedule” because scheduling is becoming harder each year.
Originally scheduled to have eight home games during the 2023 season, KU now will have seven, which is still one more home game than the program has on its 2022 schedule. Goff said KU would not have scheduled a road game to replace Houston if that would have meant dropping below seven home games for the 2023 season.
The 2023 contest will mark the first game of a home-and-home football series with Nevada. The two programs have never met.
Nevada is currently entering its first season under head coach Ken Wilson, a longtime assistant at the school who spent the last nine seasons as an assistant coach at Washington State and Oregon in the Pac-12.
During the past decade, Nevada has averaged 6.3 wins per season. That includes four consecutive winning seasons from 2018 to 2021 under former head coach Jay Norvell, who left after the 2021 season to take over at Colorado State.
