Hi everyone,

Usually, I’m the woman behind the scenes at this newsletter, editing and organizing — but today’s a bit of a change of pace. Over the weekend, I went to the Missouri-Kansas football game, the first Border War since 2011. Today, I wrote about the rivalry modern college football couldn’t kill.

— Joan

They couldn’t kill the Border War

There are two types of people in the world: people who return somewhere they love after a long time away and only notice the things that have stayed the same, and people who are blinded by the differences. 

There are the people who might pull into Columbia, Missouri, on a bright blue Saturday in September and point out the line down Ninth Street to get into Booches or the way the columns cast their shadows across the quad. And then there are the people who would gawk at the eight-story apartment buildings and count the SEC logos, who’d shake their heads at the price of beer. Going back to a college town is like entering a wavering wormhole: There’s the crumbling apartment where you once lived, and there’s the gleaming new Starbucks next door. Will you feel nostalgia or disgust? Will you remember you’ve got a mortgage now, or will you root around in your wallet for cash to pay cover?

Is it 2025, or is it 2007? 1992? Here’s a hint: Missouri and Kansas are about to play each other in football, in a game that was killed and buried in the fall of 2011, mourned and not quite forgotten. But on a highway overpass, there are protesters waving signs objecting to the state legislature’s plans to erase a Democratic district through redistricting. There’s a Tesla, and you’re texting on an iPhone — so yes, 14 years have passed, and you’re too old for that bar. Athletics directors and conference commissioners did some advanced bureaucratic CPR, and here again is your rivalry game, the Border War, air in its lungs and blood in its veins. Buy a ticket; you make enough to afford a $200 seat. Think how young you might trick yourself into feeling.

I went to Columbia on Saturday because I wanted to know if the Missouri-Kansas rivalry had actually survived. Sure, there would be a game and a score, fireworks and curse words and beer cans stomped underfoot. But would the game feel like tradition or a shoddy replacement, the New Coke of college football?

The two teams last faced each other on the field on Nov. 26, 2011 — not even a month after the Tigers announced they were bolting from the Big 12 to the SEC. By then, there was already a sense that this was the end, that realignment had killed one of the longest-standing, most vitriolic, most entertaining rivalries in college sports. If you’d grown up in a Missouri household like I did, the conversation inevitably veered toward blaming Kansas: Those sore losers didn’t want to keep up the rivalry. 

But we all knew it wasn’t Kansas’s fault, not entirely. Missouri had chased a bigger payday to the SEC, and this was a natural, if unwanted, consequence.

In the SEC, the Tigers got the immediate financial boost they’d been looking for; their first year, they took home a conference payout of $19.5 million, $7 million more than they’d earned from the Big 12 in their final year. And Missouri’s new conference delivered a custom-made rivalry, too: Arkansas! Look, it’s right there! 

But hatred isn’t born of press releases, of newly minted silver trophies. It exists because your dad despised a team, and so did your grandma, and so did her parents, and their parents — and in the case of Missouri and Kansas, that particular twisted line of loathing stretches all the way back to the Civil War, to the days of John Brown and Jesse James, when there were actual good guys and real villains, a side that was right and one that was unquestionably wrong.

And maybe that’s why this rivalry survived, dormant, as a generation of students passed through Kansas and Missouri’s flagship universities. They learned a different history: Jeremy Maclin, Todd Reesing, Arrowhead Stadium, Norm Stewart, Roy Williams. All that stored-up animosity was more than enough sustenance for 14 years of hibernation, an extended nap while college football grew and thrived and mutated into the behemoth we know today. Money put the Border War to sleep, and money woke it up. 

The last time Kansas and Missouri played, we were still pretending college sports were about something other than the bottom line, that this wasn’t big business. When the Tigers left the Big 12, they paid a $12.4 million exit fee. When Texas and Oklahoma moved on before last season, they paid a combined $100 million. There’s no pretending anymore. There’s no ignoring this much money, flowing into so many more pockets than before. College sports are up for sale; want admission to an Oklahoma press conference, a game-worn visor, a t-shirt bearing the furry face of Bowling Green’s team cat?

And here’s what else sells: rivalries. Ticket prices surge and there’s custom gear to be bought. Of course Missouri and Kansas played again; it was the easiest sales pitch west of the Mississippi. Resurrect your hatred; that’s free.

“The ability to have nonconference games with great meaning is important to us as a league,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey told reporters before the game on Saturday. But he cautioned that it might take awhile to make the Border War a permanent fixture on the teams’ schedule, if it ever gets that far. “The fact that [this game] is happening and the passion you see is an indication that it should be a thought.”

Passion is one word for the amount of expletives shouted and scrawled and muttered at Memorial Stadium on Saturday, for the legions of undergraduates who were somewhere between 4 and 8 years old the last time this game was played but who knew the rivalry’s secret language like they’d been speaking it all their lives. A few rows behind me in section 103, a Missouri fan raised an eyebrow at a man in Jayhawk blue and red. “I can’t believe you’re here,” he said, laughing. “I would never spend a single cent in Kansas.”

The videoboard played clips of past Border War games, all of them grainy and pixelated, even the newest seeming old. The north end zone was a construction site, where a few workers in neon vests paused to catch the action, working overtime, presumably, in service of the constant expansion of college football. Remember when the stadium didn’t sell beer? Remember when no one vaped? Remember sitting on cold bleachers over Thanksgiving weekend, back when this game might mean a chance at a championship? Of course you remember, because on Saturday, it didn’t feel so long ago, so different.

College football can’t mint new rivalries, but it can still sell us the old ones, and if Saturday was any indication, there will always be buyers.