After 10 days of swirling rumors, Kansas and Wichita State have officially agreed to play a nonconference basketball game that has been in the making for much, much longer.
The two in-state schools will face off in the regular season for the first time in 31 years when they battle at the T-Mobile Center in downtown Kansas City on Saturday, Dec. 30.
Early reports of the pending game had placed the date a day earlier, but instead the Jayhawks and Shockers will meet on the 30th; if the pattern of last season’s schedule holds, KU will begin Big 12 Conference play just three days later on Jan. 2.
“This will be a great opportunity for fans in the Kansas City area to watch our team over the holidays and it will be a great game for us preparing for Big 12 play,” KU coach Bill Self said in a press release.
Wichita State went 17-15 last season and then fired its coach Isaac Brown, replacing him with Paul Mills, who like Self is a former Oral Roberts head coach. Prior to his six-year stint at ORU, he had served as an assistant at Baylor, where he became familiar with the Kansas program.
“This matchup is sure to attract national attention between two tradition-rich programs,” Mills said in the release.
The two schools’ last meeting was an ignominious one for KU, which came near the peak of the modern Wichita State program and saw the Shockers beat the Jayhawks 79-65 in the 2015 NCAA Tournament on their way to an Elite Eight berth. Kansas holds a 12-3 edge in the all-time series, including a 2-0 record in a pair of meetings in Kansas City in 1985.
In Wichita State’s own announcement of the matchup, its athletic director Kevin Saal said, “It has been over three decades since our institutions have met in the regular season and we look forward to a renewed relationship between our storied and tradition-rich programs.”
