Kansas football: Game-by-game predictions for November 2023

Well, they finally did it. After going over a quarter of a century without doing so, Kansas football beat the Oklahoma Sooners this past Saturday.

In a freezing-cold rain game that included a sizable weather delay, the 5-2 Kansas just barely outlasted the 7-0 Oklahoma Sooners in Lawrence by a thrilling score of 38-33. The result not only gave the Sooners their first loss of the season, but also tied the win count the Jayhawks finished 2022 with (6-7).

Now we can talk all day about just how huge this is for Kansas, transitioning from a historical punching bag to one of the Big 12’s most exciting teams overnight (and with much reliance on a backup quarterback, too). We can also talk about how the loss exposes the limits of Oklahoma — something that I am on record as having already known — but all that’s too easy.

Instead, we’re going to spend some time attempting to take on what currently feels like a monolithic task: We’re going to guess how the Jayhawks will perform in their final month of regular-season games.

One can see what makes such a goal so difficult simply by looking at their last month’s worth of battles. Said battles include a 40-14 loss at Texas (who OU beat), a 51-22 blowout of UCF, a heartbreaking 39-32 defeat dealt by an inconsistent Oklahoma State, and the stunner over the Sooners. If that doesn’t say “emotional roller coaster,” I don’t know what does.

After all of that, it’s impossible to not declare the Kansas Jayhawks as “unpredictable” in every sense of the word — and that’s precisely why I intend to predict the rest of their journey today. So let’s get started.