Kansas State Wildcats have no plans to cut sports or add women’s flag football
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Gene Taylor said K‑State has not really studied adding women’s flag football.
- Kansas State will maintain its current roster of 16 sports and has no plans to cut any.
- K-State designates a percentage of its $21.3M 2026-27 revenue sharing budget to all teams.
Women’s flag football could become a full-fledged college sport in the next few years, with at least six teams participating within the Big 12.
But it seems unlikely that Kansas State will be among the first schools in line to sponsor a squad.
“There is a lot of talk about it nationally, but we haven’t really studied it much at all,” K-State athletics director Gene Taylor said. “Would it make sense? It’s another expense and another set of coaches. There isn’t a lot of equipment dollars, clearly, but it’s more scholarships and just more dollars that we’d have to come up with to fund another sport. Right now, that’s a lot to take on.”
Earlier this week, women’s flag football received a formal recommendation to become an NCAA championship sport. Momentum is building for women’s flag football to hit college stadiums in the spring of 2028.
That is of note for Big 12 schools, because the conference has partnered with the NFL to try and grow women’s flag football. Maybe it could have a mini league schedule in two years.
Nebraska was the first school from a power conference to formally announce it was adding a women’s flag football team in January. Five other schools (Charleston Southern, Gardner-Webb, Radford, UNC Asheville and USC Upstate) have also committed to offering the sport.
Perhaps women’s flag football will eventually emerge as an option for the Wildcats. For now, though, Taylor says K-State will stand pat with the 16 sports it currently has on campus.
Some fans have suggested that K-State should add softball and/or wrestling in the past. But the Wildcats have long preferred to focus on solely on their current sports.
That will continue to be the case as schools across the country work to increase revenue so they can better fund rosters in major sports like football and men’s basketball.
Some schools have recently gone the other direction and cut sports in order to reduce athletic costs. Wichita State has announced that it will no longer sponsor men’s and women’s golf. Arkansas briefly cut its men’s and women’s tennis teams, before bringing them back with the help of short-term funding from donors.
Taylor says there is no fear of sports getting eliminated at K-State.
Not only are the Wildcats operating at the minimum number of sports (16) for a school with FBS football, they take pride in the teams they have on campus. K-State is one of the few athletic departments in the country that designates a percentage of its revenue sharing budget ($21.3 million in 2026-27) to all of its teams.
Cutting any of them isn’t an option.
“We don’t want to do that,” Taylor said. “That is not something that has really crossed our mind at all.”