The Border War goes back to Lawrence on Friday night for the first time in 21 years, and if you care at all about college football rivalries surviving the realignment era, this is the game to watch.
No. 23 Missouri, 1-0, plays at Kansas, also 1-0, at 7 p.m. CT at David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium. It is the first Missouri trip to Lawrence since 2005, and the Tigers are roughly four and a half point favorites.
The series dates to 1891 and its roots run through actual Civil War-era violence along the Kansas-Missouri border. Then Missouri left the Big 12 for the SEC in 2012, the series went dark, and Kansas fans spent a decade nursing a grudge that never cooled off.
The rivalry came back last season and Missouri won 42-31 in Columbia. So Kansas has been sitting on that for a year, at home, on a Friday night, in front of a stadium that has been waiting since 2005 for this exact scenario.
Here is the part that raises the stakes beyond a normal September game: the scheduled series runs out after this, with the teams not set to meet again until the early 2030s. Whoever wins Friday owns the bragging rights for the better part of a decade. There is no quick rematch and no chance to even it up next fall.
That is an unusual amount of weight to hang on a September game, and both fan bases understand it perfectly.
Missouri carries the ranking and the expectation. Getting to 2-0 with a road win over a Big 12 team is exactly the kind of result that holds up in November when the committee starts sorting out SEC teams with similar records. A loss here does not end Missouri’s season, but it puts a dent in the resume that an SEC schedule will not let them forget.
Kansas has the opposite calculus and the better leverage. A win over a ranked SEC opponent at home instantly reframes the Jayhawks’ season and gives them a signature result before conference play even starts. Kansas football has spent most of the last 15 years looking for a night like this.
Home field in a rivalry game at night with nothing to lose is a real advantage, and I would not be shocked if the favorite gets uncomfortable early. Friday night crowds in Lawrence for a game this loaded are going to be something.
Missouri should win. The Tigers have the more established program, they won the first meeting by 11, and a four-point spread in a rivalry road game is the market saying the talent gap is real but the environment is worth something.
I am taking Missouri, and I expect it to be closer than the number. Kansas keeps this within a score into the fourth quarter and then runs out of margin for error. Call it Missouri by six.
But the result matters less than the fact this game exists. Conference realignment has quietly killed off a long list of rivalries that should have been untouchable, and Missouri-Kansas is one of the few that clawed its way back onto a schedule. Two teams that actually dislike each other, playing a Friday night game with a decade of bragging rights attached to it.
More of this, please. And somebody should figure out how to keep it on the calendar past this week.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
