Kansas Football Gets Their First Primetime Game Since 2009...Opens As 37.5 Point Underdogs

Kmarko10/18/2017 6:45 PM

LAWRENCE — FOX executives on Sunday made the call to air KU’s upcoming contest at No. 4 TCU in front of a national audience, slotting it for a 7 p.m. Saturday kickoff on the their flagship network. It represents the Jayhawks’ first prime-time, nationally-televised game since Nov. 21, 2009, when KU played at Texas on ABC, and its first appearance on FOX since the 2008 Orange Bowl.

The Jayhawks (1-5, 0-3 Big 12) enter Saturday’s game a 37½-point underdog, the largest point spread of the 56 contests listed at odds outlet VegasInsider.com. With that in mind, it may seem peculiar FOX Sports executives felt this game worthy of a national audience in prime time.

Lot of people confused by the college football scheduling this weekend and I can’t say I blame them. You grab the best stool at the bar, or you stretch out on the couch to watch a game with your buddies before you go out later, you flip on FOX for the primetime game, and it’s….TCU and Kansas? 2017 TCU and 2017 Kansas?

Quick refresher:

Kansas football tale of the tape!

Record: 1-5.

That one win? Season opener…against an FCS school. Next 5 against real teams? 5 losses.

Oh and those losses? By an average of 28.6 points.

The last loss? 45-0 to Iowa State.

Okay now that we’re all caught up on KU’s season, we can go right back to forgetting about them right? WRONG!

FOX decided to give them their first primetime game since 2009 – first FOX nationally televised game since the ’08 Orange Bowl – AT NUMBER 4 TCU. The 1-5 dumpster fire of a Jayhawks team coming at you LIVE with the biggest spread of the weekend out of every single game listed on VegasInsider. 37.5. Remarkable.

Here’s the reasoning:

Derek Crocker, senior director of collegiate sports for FOX Sports, told The Topeka Capital-Journal the decision was based on a multitude of factors.
“For us, we obviously want top-ranked teams, interesting storylines,” Crocker said. “We’d done some homework before going into this pick, knowing TCU and Kansas have played some fairly tight games the past few years.”

Well that’s…true. I mean it’s factually correct.

The Jayhawks haven’t lost to the Horned Frogs by more than two touchdowns since TCU (6-0, 3-0) entered the Big 12 in 2012 and have dropped the last three contests by a combined margin of 11 points, including last year’s one-point defeat at Memorial Stadium.
That, combined with the four upsets of top-10 squads falling to unranked opponents last week, made the KU/TCU matchup a palatable option for FOX.
“All of those things combined I think helped us make this pick,” Crocker said, “and be comfortable with it in prime time.”

There’s a full in depth breakdown of just how exactly that picking process works from the Topeka Courier-Journal.

A more obvious reason?

Competition.

Michigan/Penn State and USC/Notre Dame are both in that same time slot. Makes sense to put the dogshit game up against those and run OSU/Texas, Iowa State/Texas Tech, and OU/K State earlier. And, all of this media and blog attention about how horrible it all is? May actually work in their favor. I know that I’m actually excited to check up on this one on Saturday as opposed to not caring/probably not even knowing it was on. So much intrigue around it now. Much like publicly bashing something like, oh I don’t know, a new show on ESPN 2 just ends up getting it more eyeballs, all the sarcastic and snarky articles about how awful this game is just might make it way more watchable.

None of that is gonna help Kansas on the field playing in front of a national audience as 38 point dogs though. This man is not walking through that door to save your ass.