Kansas' Late-Night Kickoff a Glimpse of New Reality

Fans will be up late watching the Jayhawks play out west on Saturday and that's likely going to continue with conference realignment.

The Kansas Jayhawks will start their week-three matchup against the Nevada Wolf Pack in Reno late in the evening back in the Central time zone on Saturday and likely won’t end until after the clock has turned to Sunday in Lawrence.

This is obviously a factor for the players, though they are in college and staying up past midnight — or in this case having body clocks that feel like it’s past midnight — isn’t exactly a foreign concept to them. I would guess that 11 a.m. starts are probably more challenging than games later at night considering how easily they must wake up and get ready. It makes for a long game day, but it’s not insurmountable and KU has played in night games the past two weeks.

For fans – especially those like me who have two young boys, so sleeping in on a Saturday is impossible with early soccer games – the 9:30 p.m. local kickoff, and staying awake through the end of regulation, presents a bigger challenge. This will be an even bigger challenge if, like we expect (the line is KU -28), the game isn’t competitive and Kansas has a huge lead in the second half.

The bigger takeaway is that it feels like there’s only going to be more of this in the future with conference realignment shaking up the college sports world. West-coast teams are moving into conferences with teams in the Central and Eastern time zones, and yet there are still only a finite number of TV slots before 9 p.m. that can accommodate these games. In years before, teams in the Pacific time zone faced each other 70% of the time and could own the late-night time slots on ESPN and Fox for the rest of the country. But moving forward, instead of UCLA playing Oregon or Stanford facing off against Arizona at 10 p.m. EST on a Saturday night, UCLA will be hosting Maryland and Stanford will be up against Miami.

Kansas will likely feel some of this, too. Next year, Arizona, Arizona State, Utah, BYU, and Colorado will all be located in either the Mountain or Pacific time zones. It won’t be weekly, but KU will have a few games over the course of the year between the major sports where it will likely be a late start for fans. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just the new reality.

So treat this Nevada game like a practice run for the coming years. Because this won’t be the last time a Kansas game flirts with midnight local time in Lawrence.