Kansas vs. Missouri football game, our region’s best rivalry, shifts to Friday night on national TV

The Kansas and Missouri football rivalry comes back to Lawrence this year. (Illustration by Eric Thomas for Kansas Reflector)

The bitter college football feud between Kansas and Missouri, dating back to Civil War raids and torched cities, returns to Lawrence this year — and we received additional details Friday about the 2026 installment.

In short, the best football game in the heartland has been upgraded.

The schools announced that kickoff has moved to Sept. 11, a Friday night. They also secured national television coverage, making the game one of the only college games available.

KU’s website bills the match-up as the “Friday Night Battle” or, less poetically, “The StorageMart Border Showdown.” Mizzou simply calls it “Friday Night Football.”

(Jayhawk fans should be doubly grateful: Shifting the game to Friday gives their team an extra day before the long trip to London for a match against Arizona State.)

Given my personal history, I feel uniquely, constantly and ecstatically twisted up in this two-state rivalry. On one hand, Mizzou was my alma mater — twice. On the other hand, I have taught thousands of students at Kansas in the university’s journalism and mass communication school.

When I told my father-in-law — a die-hard Missouri Tigers fan — that I would be starting a job at the University of Kansas, he looked me over the top of his glasses in his trademark way.

“Congratulations,” he said. “When are you leaving the family?”

Ouch.

In my most rabid moment of Mizzou fandom, I remember beating the No.1-ranked men’s basketball Jayhawks in the Hearnes Center. Walking out of the game and down the ramp outside the oversized shoebox of an arena, I clutched my head in disbelief at the win. As I did, I also couldn’t believe the cascade of expletives and nastiness from fans around me, both Jayhawks and Tigers.

Even at my peak black-and-gold, I couldn’t embrace the vitriol of rooting against another team. While I wanted Mizzou to beat KU, did I root against KU in their other games?

“No,” I answered. “I just care that my team does well.”

This was clearly not the correct answer to those huddled around me in Columbia. “We want KU to lose every game,” they said. “We want them to suffer.”

It’s been the same at KU. When I sweetly tried to make peace between Mizzou and KU before the 2025 football game, my Lawrence lecture hall jeered at me. The Jayhawks were not sharing my Kumbaya energy.

With the animosity surrounding them, you might think that my own kids would be twisted up in the rivalry. Mom and dad met at Mizzou, after all, and snagged a few degrees along the way before moving to the Missouri side of Kansas City. However, both of our kids were born in Overland Park, and I have taught at KU for 13 years.

My kids don’t really care. For their generation, it makes sense.

Kansas has not hosted the border rivalry during the lifetime of my high school son. The last Jayhawk home game was 2005.

My son’s once-ferocious allegiance to the Jayhawks is now flimsy enough that he borrowed one of my Mizzou t-shirts when he went to Columbia for the renewed rivalry last year.

With all due respect to the Sunflower Showdown between Kansas and Kansas State, the border rivalry is the peak regional game in any sport: America’s most popular sport, played between the two largest university fanbases that loathe each other, in a historically almost dead even rivalry.

The Chiefs don’t have a regional rival. The Royals-vs.-Cardinals match-up has faded since the 1980s, when the I-70 showdown defined the top teams in baseball. Even the Mizzou-KU basketball tradition seems tame, given the Jayhawks’ dominance (177-96).

Meanwhile, the football game is so contested that the schools can’t agree on the historic win-loss-tie record. Missouri football boasted Friday that it “holds a 58-54-9 lead in the series,” but KU fans contest the 1960 game and list the record as 57-55-9 all-time.

Missouri’s 2012 exit for the Southeastern Conference, while a successful grab for prestige and revenue, robbed the region of 13 KU-MU games. Kansas City has felt tame since then. No Thanksgiving border war at Arrowhead Stadium. Less trash talk at the office about the upcoming game. No taunts outside the Big 12 basketball tournament in downtown Kansas City.

When the schools announced in 2020 that they would resume football games, they showed a four-year gap between this year’s game and another in 2031. Let’s hope that hole closes up with additional games from 2027 to 2030. 

With another border war game coming to campus in September, do I need to apologize to my students and my family for being both Tiger and Jayhawk?

Does my allegiance to both the Tigers and the Jayhawks mean that I am a traitor, willing to abandon my alma mater in Columbia for a paycheck in Lawrence? 

Or, does it mean that I am a flexible and gracious soul, trying to bring equanimity to the east and west sides of the state line? 

What does it say that I try to keep one foot each on these drifting icebergs — one black and gold, the other crimson and blue — of college fandom?

Jayhawks and Tigers, you decide. 

In the end, I have a feeling that my status as a traitor will be one of the few things that both fanbases can agree on.

Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.