The first game is not happening for five years and the series won’t return as an annual event. But finding each other on four future football schedules is big news for Kansas, Missouri and college football for a few reasons.
One quick quibble: A Saturday midday announcement with dueling press releases? The thawing of the Border cold War merited at least a video call in this pandemic pause.
Maybe more splash would have been created if the Chiefs and Arrowhead Stadium were part of the series, as they were the last five times the teams met. But the games in 2025, 2026, 2031 and 2032 are set for Columbia and Lawrence.
I’m good either way on the location. Students must fork over to travel and local merchants lose out when matchups go to neutral sites. So cheers for keeping these contests on campus.
But anyone who attended the first Border War game at Arrowhead in 2007 will never forget the surreal setting of a showdown between the nation’s second- and third-ranked teams, with the winner becoming No. 1 because top-ranked LSU had lost the previous day.
Before the second-largest crowd in Arrowhead history, more than 80,000, the Tigers jumped to a three-touchdown lead and held off a Jayhawks rally to win by eight in the highest-rated college football game broadcast that regular season.
Let that sink in. Kansas and Missouri, with a combined 21-1 record, playing for a No. 1 ranking in front of an overflow crowd in one of the NFL’s largest stadiums, and nearly 11 million viewers tuned in. ESPN’s GameDay set an audience record that day, too.
KU avenged the defeat the next year with a dramatic victory decided as the snow was falling. Three more games were played at Arrowhead. The sixth and final contest of that contract didn’t happen because Missouri left the Big 12 for the SEC.
That move, along with moves made by Texas A&M to the SEC, Nebraska to the Big Ten and Colorado to the Pac-12 over a two-schoolyear span, came as the Tigers, Aggies, Huskers and Buffs sought a more stable conference environment than the Big 12 could provide at that moment, and gave Kansas City a sports panic attack.
About this time a decade ago, the Big 12 appeared to have no future. The Star’s front-page headline on June 13, 2010 read: “Collapse of Big 12 means big uncertainties for KC, Mizzou, KU and K-State.”
Not only did the Big 12 not collapse, the league regenerated and holds its own financially with other major conferences to this day.
But realignment left bitter feelings, and Kansas broke off athletic relations with Missouri. Over the next few years, as the Jayhawks lost whatever bad blood may have been felt with schools not named Mizzou and renewed basketball series with Nebraska and Colorado, KU kept its back turned on Columbia.
The good-riddance stance resonated with many Kansas fans. But KU also was snubbing history. The Border War football series was the oldest west of the Mississippi, and the second most-played, when the teams split. No other college sports rivalry traces its roots to the Civil War. KU-West Virginia was going to replace that in the hearts of fans?
A full Sprint Center for a charity exhibition game two years ago proved the Border War still mattered, and in October KU and Mizzou announced a six-year basketball series starting next season in Kansas City. And now football is coming back, too. Athletic directors Jim Sterk at Missouri and Kansas’ Jeff Long made it happen.
An uncertain college sports landscape undoubtedly played a role in the renewal of relations. Before the first MU-KU football game is played, college athletes will have had the opportunity to cash in on their name, image and likeness; the Big 12 will have a new media contract; and if Eliah Drinkwitz and Les Miles aren’t coaches for the 2025 game, it likely means the programs have started over.
