Best 1-2 start ever?

Only twice has KU opened the season with two teams in the AP top 25. In 1996 we opened against #8 Utah and then played #15 Virginia. In 1958 we opened against Canisius and Oklahoma St., both ranked 20th. 26 times have we had at l;east one ranked team in the first two games. 3 times we have played the preseason No. 1 team in the opening two games. in 2014-15 season we played #1 Kentucky in the 2nd game. In the 1994-95 season we played UMass in the 2nd game and in the 1981-82 season we played North Carolina to open the season. So if we manage to skate into Lawrence on November 16th with a pair of wins this will be the best opening to a season in KU history.

BTW, that game against North Carolina in 1981 was the first collegiate basketball game for a young man named Michael Jordan.

I think it's great that we're playing two ranked teams out of the gate, and to a certain extent the outcome can be either significant or totally meaningless...depending on the following factors:

>Say we beat both Indiana and Duke, but one or both of them turn out to be over-hyped and they fizzle later in the year. Or worse, we beat two highly ranked teams by narrow margins only to watch them collapse and get blown out by not-good teams. In this case, our early "accomplishment' might not mean much later.

>Conversely, if both teams do great all year any losses to them will be somewhat mitigated if both end up being NC contenders.

>Then you have the fickle press who occasionally show their bias. Say we crush both teams, and both teams go on to have strong seasons and are vying for #1 seeds...it's entirely likely (especially in the case of the media's love of Duke) that when it comes to selection time that the media will position a team like Duke ahead of KU even if they've lost in a head-to-head matchup simply because "it was too early in the year to matter."

So in some ways, neither of these games mean much. If we lose one or both, we still have plenty of time to recover. If we win one or both, we need to take the result with a bit of a grain of salt, and (hopefully) the team will realize that they still have about 30 undecided contests ahead of them, and that previous wins don't guarantee future results.

I'm thinking that the BEST thing that comes out of these matchups is that it gives KU a great opportunity for recruiting and marketing. Having announcers talk about the streak of Big 12 championships nationally, our history, and to do so when the team is demonstrating a high level of play is the best thing possible to show recruits.