Ole Miss women’s basketball to host Kansas as part of the SEC/Big 12 Challenge

Published 12:27 pm Thursday, May 28, 2020

The Southeastern and Big 12 Conferences jointly announced the lineup for the 2020 women’s basketball SEC/Big 12 Challenge on Thursday, and it featured a big matchup for Ole Miss.

The Rebels will host the Kansas Jayhawks for the first time in program history as one of the 10 games taking place this fall. A date and time for the game will be announced later, along with the rest of the Rebels’ non-conference slate for the 2020-21 season.

This will be the third time Ole Miss has participated in the Challenge. The previous two times were in 2016 when the Rebels traveled to No. 16 West Virginia and in 2018 when they hosted TCU.

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Ole Miss has played the Jayhawks two previous times, and has an overall record of 2-0 in the series. The Rebels first win came in 1988 at the Aruba Sunshine Shootout in the Virgin Islands, with a 61-40 victory over Kansas. The second win occurred in 2006 during the first round of the WNIT with a 78-76 win over the Jayhawks in Allen Fieldhouse.

Kansas is coming off a 15-14 season and returning Big 12 All-Freshman guard Zakiyah Franklin and leading scorer Aniya Thomas.

The inaugural Challenge took place in 2014, with the first 10-game slate occurring in 2016. The SEC edged the Big 12 6-4 in 2016 and split the Challenge 5-5 in 2017 and 2018. The Big 12 got their first Challenge win in 2019. Each season, 10 of the 14 SEC teams will play all 10 of the Big 12 teams in a format that includes five home games on campus sites for each conference.

The other nine games in the 2020 Challenge are:

  • South Carolina at Iowa State
  • Kentucky at Kansas State
  • Alabama at Oklahoma State
  • Texas A&M at Texas
  • Tennessee at West Virginia
  • Baylor at Arkansas
  • Oklahoma at Georgia
  • TCU at Missouri
  • Texas Tech at Vanderbilt