Oklahoma State's Bryce Thompson Set for Final Game at Kansas

Oklahoma State’s longest-tenured player is set for his final game at his first school and needs to carry his recent momentum for the Cowboys to win.

On Saturday, OSU will face Kansas in the teams’ only regular-season matchup. While the teams have typically played twice every season, the new 16-team Big 12 with a 20-game slate limits home-and-homes. While OSU won’t get the Jayhawks in Stillwater, OSU guard Bryce Thompson will still get to visit the court where he played his freshman season. 

Thompson has spent the past four seasons in Stillwater, and it could be easy to forget he started his career at Kansas. Narrowly choosing the Jayhawks over the Cowboys out of high school in 2020, Thompson chose to come back to his home state and play in Gallagher-Iba Arena after only one season with Bill Self’s team. In the 2020-21 season with Kansas, Thompson averaged 4.6 points in 17.1 minutes across 20 games, leading to him searching for a larger role with the Cowboys.

With the recent report that Self considered taking the OSU job over the offseason, this game has some more fire than usual. As for the game itself, it could be a chance for Thompson to have some closure and earn his first win in Allen Fieldhouse as a Cowboy.

Since winning at Kansas in the 2017-18 season, the Cowboys have lost six straight there. The closest call came in a two-point loss on New Year’s Eve in the 2022-23 season, with Bryce Thompson scoring a then-career-high 23 points and nailing a game-tying 3-pointer with 14.8 seconds left before Kansas scored on its final possession to get the win a few seconds later.

Unfortunately, Thompson didn’t get the opportunity to have another big game in Kansas last season, as he suffered a season-ending shoulder injury only a few minutes into the contest. Outside of that game, Thompson has typically done well against the Jayhawks, averaging 15.8 points across the other five games, with four games of at least 10 points.

As he ventures back into the arena where his career began, he is coming off one of the best games in college, scoring a career-high 25 points in OSU’s bounce-back win against UCF on Wednesday. If Thompson can carry momentum from that game into Allen Fieldhouse, the Cowboys might be able to pull the upset.