OU-Texas football or KU-Mizzou hoops? Not so easy a call after this year
Published: 2/26/2012 8:41 PM
Last Modified: 2/27/2012 9:33 AM
The Kansas-Missouri basketball rivalry peaked Saturday. It had to. I watched the game from my living room and was totally wrung out. They say it was never louder in Allen Fieldhouse. I both believe that and am amazed by that.
I was in the fieldhouse the 1990 night that No. 1 KU played No. 2 Mizzou. Never experienced noise like that in my life, and never will again I'm quite certain. I was a KU senior then, and I remember going home to my apartment late that night, walking into a dark bedroom, collapsing onto a bed, closing my eyes and trying to just settle down. I fell asleep to the ring in my ears, and swear I woke up to it the next morning.
By all accounts, it was more intense Saturday than it was that night 20 years ago. Or any other night in KU basketball history. Only the last (for now) game against Missouri could provoke that kind of insanity. That's what it looked and sounded like to me, anyway, watching from my living room. Sheer insanity.
For the sake of this blog, then, I thought it worth asking: As of today, what's the superior rivalry?
KU-Mizzou basketball?
Or OU-Texas football?
Has to be OU-Texas. Right? I mean, it's a football rivalry, and football is why we're all here. It's why decisions are made. How money is made. It's the reason that KU-Mizzou is going away, Mizzou ultimately deciding it was a football school and joining the richest, baddest football conference in America.
Has to be OU-Texas, never mind money and TV and realignment. Every year, that game has a direct impact on the two teams' championship dreams. You can't say that about KU-Mizzou. You can't say that about any basketball rivalry, since everything's basically for pride until March.
Think of all those stakes across all those years of football for both OU and Texas. All of those one-shot deals for all of those players. They get two cracks at each other every year when it comes to KU-Mizzou basketball. A third, occasionally, at the conference tournament.
Think of all those times OU and Texas have used their get-together as a springboard to national glory. How many times has that happened for Missouri, still without a single Final Four appearance?
Think of the Cotton Bowl. There's no state fair outside Allen Fieldhouse or Mizzou Arena. No slow bus ride through the screaming masses just to get to the locker room. No line down the middle of the gym, crimson and blue on one side, old gold and black on the other.
Aside No. 1: By far the most exciting, entertaining Bedlam basketball game I have attended was the one at the Big 12 tournament three years ago. The one in Oklahoma City, a Ford Center split right down the middle. For two hours, someone had something to shriek about. It was mad, wonderful theater.
That's what you get in the Cotton Bowl every October. Take two powerhouse teams, add their fan bases and marching bands and mascots and the fair and the old stadium. Consider what's at stake.
I dare you to find something better, something more intense, in college sports. I really don't believe it can be done..
But you know something… The level KU-Mizzou reached this basketball season, the level it reached Saturday in Lawrence… Man…
Generations of hatred boiled over is all.
See, this is what folks around here don't quite understand; I had no idea, until I went to college at Kansas. Oklahoma and Texas are neighbors, but nobody from Texas ever crossed the Red River and burned Norman to the ground. No Okie abolitionist ever waged a holy war on the proslavery Lone Star State.
That stuff really went down between Kansas and Missouri, thanks to John Brown and William Quantrill in the anything-goes mid-19th century. When the 20th century came along, the states' two flagship universities decided they'd take their hostilities out on each other in a slightly more civilized setting.
Joe Posnanski explained it better than I could in his Kansas City Star column from Saturday's game: "This Missouri-Kansas thing goes back to bloodshed, to war, to hard feelings that certainly soften but never quite go away. Those feelings spill out on the hardwood, no matter the situation, no matter how many games one team has won or how many the other has lost."
Something dawned on me when I put together a Red River Rivalry layout for the World a couple weeks ago – it would so much steamier if Texas actually hated OU. Texas doesn't hate anybody. It doesn't flatter them
Oh, they pack half the Cotton Bowl every October, chant "OU sucks!" and now and then poke their fingers in your chest if you're wearing crimson around the fairgrounds. But it seems mostly out of duty. The Sooners show up and pick fights which don't stop until orange blood has dropped. If the Longhorns retaliated with equal bitterness, we'd have a rivalry barely containable.
As it is, the setting, the stakes and the fact that it's football make it more unique, to me, than any rivalry in college sports
(Aside No. 2: If I ever experience Ohio State-Michigan or Auburn-Alabama in person, I reserve the right to change that opinion.)
That remains the case.
But after this basketball season, with KU-Mizzou literally laying it all on the line one last time… After Saturday's scene at Allen Fieldhouse, as well as the one from Mizzou Arena a few weeks ago… It's no longer closed.
Let's keep it open, at least, until the Tigers bolt the Big 12 for the SEC. Until the Tigers close it for us, probably forever.
-- Guerin Emig
Written by
Guerin Emig
Sports Writer
