THEY DID IT AGAIN

THE JAYHAWKS, I MEAN. THE JAYHAWKS WON A GAME OF FOOTBALL. I’M NOT SPECIFICALLY REFERRING JUST TO THE FANS IN THE ABOVE PHOTO BUT THEY ARE SIGNIFICANT TO THE POINT OF THIS POST. For the first time in well over a year, the Kansas Jayhawks left a football field with the higher score of the two participants in a football game. This is, naturally, cause for celebration, and nobody celebrates quite like we do: With a good ooool’ fashioned field rushin’.

I, watching on my laptop from a hotel room in Detroit, began to run through the script in my mind as soon as the Jayhawks forced a South Dakota turnover on downs with seconds left. Are they gonna run on the field? Are they gonna go for the goalposts? And then it hit me – I’ve felt something like this before…

Remember that? 2016 versus Rhode Island? It hit me that the reason why I felt the echoes the way that I did was because this was literally the exact same situation. Winless season in the year prior, beating a team, any team, for the first time in well over a calendar year. The main differences in this one are:

1. Lance Leipold got his first win
2. Couldn’t gather last season for whatever reason

But otherwise, this was not different from what happened only five years ago. And I remember the hemming and hawing. I remember the page clicks I got from said hemming and hawing “Is it worth storming the field for this? Is it right? Is that embarrassing? How will this affect the Kansas Football brand on a national level?” Those were all questions that I asked myself as a 21 year-old KU Football fan.

In the five years since, my opinion has changed. Now, I start from a recognition, “They’re not going to stop playing football,” and then I extrapolate from there. That is the cornerstone, the very essence of my philosophy regarding Kansas football. They play it. It is a constant. Regardless of what I want or don’t want, they will play it. The world came to a stop last year for whatever reason and, still, somehow, Kansas football still played. There is no opinion I can hold that can change anything regarding this program, no amount of influence I ever feasibly have will change anything regarding this program, and also I am going to continue watching them every time they play because I went to school there for several years. And just as they will not stop playing it, whenever they win a game immediately following a winless season, the students will probably run on to the field and celebrate. 

This is how we end up in this place again. Five years apart, and what has changed? In the exact same situation, on the same field, against a team from the same D-I subdivision, with the same gripes. The only thing new is the coach! Also all of the players. Also probably all of the students who did the field rushing. I suppose that many aspects here are new, when I type it out like that. But I’m not backspacing through that whole sentence, oh no. 

There will be angry people, mad about the jubilation and the trespassing, but I am doubtful that the students on the field cared what anyone else thinks about it, and given the way that these students were scapegoated and treated as little more than disease vectors last year, apathy might be the ideal emotion for everyone else to be shown.

Regardless, football is back, Kansas football is back, and Kansas students rushing the field is back. I will see you again after the first win and first field-rushing in 2026 after the 2025 winless season when Kansas is playing in the B1G-PACC 32 MegaUltraConference Alliance, and we start out the 2026 season playing Bishop Sycamore University (this is also after every city in the United States has been burnt to the ground after riots when the USMNT loses the World Cup final to Germany on another Torsten Frings handball, and I do mean Torsten Frings, I mean a 49 year-old Torsten Frings) and we sneak out a one-point win on a game-winning incident wherein the other team tries to punt out of their own endzone but the kick goes behind them and it’s a safety for a final score of 4-3 (the prior Bishop Sycamore safety would have been intended to waste time but we intentionally punt it right back to them, pinning them on the one yard line, and they end up accidentally spiking the ball every time they try to kneel down leaving them with 5 seconds on the clock and a necessary punt, which as mentioned earlier ends up going behind the punter). The students will rush the field after that, and maybe they’ll even go for the goalposts. Rock Chalk, baby.

Also they go winless in 2025 because Leipold leads the team to the national championship in 2024 and after the season he takes an expansion NFL job and due to a loophole every player on his team enters the Transfer Portal and signs for this expansion NFL team (I’m thinking it will be a pro-rel situation with the revived Alliance of American Football, which is revived in 2022 after this combined college and NFL season creates an insatiable, unquenchable thirst for football never before seen in this country and the land-rush for alternative football leagues for the spring to keep the buzz going is swift and all-encompassing, the AAF, the XFL, the NuSFL, the XXXFL (which is an adult-oriented football league – featuring full-frontal nudity, POVs, DPs – more DPs than MLS has, folks!), and the FCF all expand to incredible success and the NFL is forced to take on new teams, so he’s the new coach of the San Diego Fleet). Also Joe Bush wins a million dollars for the funniest blog post written about a college football game in the 2021 calendar year. Not for this one but for my upcoming “Huis Clos” parody involving both the Oklahoma horse mascots stuck in a room for eternity with Bevo from Texas.