Jackets, Kansas to meet in 2010-11

Georgia Tech’s football team will cross the Mississippi River for a regular-season game for the first time in seven years in 2010.

Tech has agreed to play Kansas in a two-year series and will travel to Lawrence the first year of the deal. The game is tentatively scheduled for Sept. 11.

The Jayhawks will play in Atlanta in 2011, with the game tentatively scheduled for Sept. 17.

“I know it’s going to be a huge challenge to go on the road and play a team from the Big 12,” Tech coach Paul Johnson said. “It’ll be good for our guys to experience a different part of the country and a different mind-set in a different conference.”

Not only does the game mark the first regular-season trip west of the Mississippi since Tech opened the 2003 campaign with a loss to BYU, it’s also the first time Tech has played an opponent from the Big 12 since 1993 when it defeated Baylor.

Johnson said the scheduling worked out well for two reasons. He would prefer not to play two Division I-AA teams in a season, and smaller I-A schools are starting to ask for more money in payouts. For example, Georgia recently agreed to pay I-A North Texas $975,000 to play at Sanford Stadium in 2013, and will pay I-A Louisiana-Lafayette $875,000 for a 2010 game.

Tech will pay I-AA opponent South Carolina State $225,000 for its game in 2010. The contract was finalized in 2006. The payout to I-AA Georgia Southern, which Tech will play in 2015, will be decided in 2013 and the Jackets will pay I-A Middle Tennessee State $500,000 after their three-game series ends in 2012.

Kansas went 8-5, 4-4 in the conference, last season. It beat Minnesota 42-21 in the Insight Bowl in Tempe, Ariz.

The two teams haven’t met since the 1948 Orange Bowl, which Tech won 20-14.

“Meeting new people. Playing new people. Seeing something different,” quarterback Josh Nesbitt said to describe the appeal of playing the Jayhawks.

“There’s a lot of different types of football in the world. It’s good to go out and see it and play against it.”