As a Mizzou fan and future student, seeing the Missouri-Kansas football rivalry end was disappointing enough. Watching the final basketball game will be painful too.
But the worst part is that both sides are okay watching it end and moving on.
Maybe you have to be a fan of one of the schools to understand, but the Border War is a big deal to both sides. Missouri fans don’t hate any other school half as much as they hate Kansas, and the same goes for the other side.
Especially when it comes to the St. Louis area, thousands of kids are raised as fans of one school or the other and end up attending one of them. I’ve seen it for myself and that adds to the intensity.
Even when the Kansas football program is irrelevant, which is almost always, the basketball matchup usually lives up to the hype. The powerhouse Jayhawk basketball team can usually expect a hostile game when they visit Mizzou Arena.
So it’s a shame that the two schools, but mostly Kansas, are about to let Missouri’s move to the SEC end a 150-year rivalry that began
during the Civil War.
College football and basketball revolve around the passionof historic local rivalries like this one more than any other sport, which means that schools should do everything possible to keep them alive.
So even if Kansas is bitter or jealous about Mizzou upgrading to the SEC, it needs to realize that fans and players would prefer meaningful games against the Tigers instead of some random a Big Ten team in non-conference play.
And does Mizzou expect to replace the Border War with a manufactured rivalry against Kentucky or Tennessee? Good rivalries take decades
to develop, 150 years in this case. Neither side will find anything else like it.
College sports are losing their collective souls more and more by the day. Money continues to be the motivation behind every action that
schools and conferences take.
If schools want to prove that the actual games and competition still matter at all, and they won’t agree to a playoff in football,
the least they can do is keep these rivalries alive.
Give the fans what they want. Give college football what it needs.
