Around 5 or 5:15 p.m. local time on Saturday, the second Missouri Tigers home game of the season will go to a commercial break before the fourth quarter begins, and as has become customary in recent seasons, the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” will play over the loudspeaker.
It has also become customary that the Mizzou fans in attendance at Memorial Stadium will lob F-bombs in unison at their biggest rival.
For the first time in quite a few years, that rival will be in said stadium to hear it.
Missouri and the Kansas Jayhawks will meet on the gridiron for the first time since 2011 (3:30 p.m. ET on ESPN2) and for the first time in Columbia since 2006. When Mizzou left the Big 12 for the SEC in 2012, the rivalry went on pause. The basketball rivalry resumed in 2021, with Kansas winning the first three games and Mizzou finally getting back on the board last December. Now it’s football’s turn.
This rivalry’s roots stem from Civil War days. Both schools’ nicknames were derived from Civil War nomenclature — “Jayhawkers” were robbers and raiders who terrorized slave-state supporters in Missouri counties bordering Kansas, while “Tigers” refers to a group of soldiers who protected the city of Columbia from pro-Confederacy guerillas, including some of the same people who participated in burning Lawrence to the ground in 1863. Mizzou and Kansas fans have certainly leaned into Civil War and Burning Lawrence connotations through the years, as problematic as it may look from the outside.
The rivalry’s name was changed from “Border War” to “Border Showdown” in the 2000s, but it didn’t tamp down the hostility. For that matter, neither did conference realignment. If you’re a KU or MU fan living in…
