On Friday, Kansas opens against Long Island University, and the biggest question may not be about the opponent at all. It’s about how much of the playbook KU is willing to show with Missouri waiting the following week.
The Sharks have only been around since 2019, the same year they moved into Division I FCS play. Since then, LIU has won 22 games, with a 6-6 season in 2025 standing as its best mark. The program is in the Northeastern Conference with Wagner, a team KU handled 46-7 last season.
That backdrop makes this a pretty natural spot for Kansas to keep things contained. The Jayhawks have done that before in season openers against FCS teams, even during the Andy Kotelnicki years when the offense was usually at its most inventive.
In 2022 against Tennessee Tech, Jalon Daniels kept KU moving in an easy win, but the offense didn’t lean heavily on option looks. There were at least a couple Daniels read-option plays, and they showed up right at the start of the second half. The next week was a different story in the overtime win over West Virginia, when KU leaned on a string of option plays after falling behind 14-0.
That may have been a matter of timing as much as anything else. West Virginia simply hadn’t seen that version of KU on tape yet.
The following season brought a similar pattern. Against Missouri State, Jason Bean guided a quiet blowout, and Kansas kept the opener restrained before opening things up the next week against Illinois.
This time, the difference wasn’t the option game. It was the pre-snap movement - the tight end motions, the wide receiver shifts, the side-to-side wrinkles that KU kept mostly under wraps in Week 1.
That’s what makes Friday interesting. Against a team like LIU, and with an SEC opponent on deck, Kansas could go pretty conservative and still have enough reason to save the full menu for later. But it also may not want to be completely plain, because Missouri still needs something to study.
So the real question is where KU draws that line: enough to stay simple against LIU, but enough to make the Tigers spend time preparing for what might be coming next.
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