I grew up in Hutchinson, then Overland Park, Kansas, before attending the University of Kansas. Rock chalk!
So I’ve spent a good portion of my life watching Missouri fans do a bit about William Quantrill. Insisting the Missouri Ruffian was right, a hero, and that he did what needed doing. This is the man who rode into Lawrence on an August morning in 1863 and had something like 150 men and boys shot in front of their families. But the fans who wear Missouri’s black and gold still put his name on game posters and wear it to tailgates because I guess that's who Missouri fans are?
So it was fascinating to learn this week that some felt the Civil War is off-limits.
I’m writing about this because the Kansas football program posted a 90-second hype video Thursday called “Heroes and Villains.” It’s narrated by NFL Hall of Famer and KU alum Gilbert Brown. It features abolitionist John Brown and Quantrill, and there’s a line about right and wrong and which side of the state line each lived on. By the end of Friday night’s game, it had been viewed 32 million times and generated a ton of online discussion. People who know the history mostly praised it for getting it right and delighted in the deep-seated regional hatred that makes college football so special. The people who found it unseemly and bizarre were, with remarkable consistency, all Missouri people. Go figure!
Nobody has disputed a single fact in the history the video describes. For those who don’t recall this particularly ugly chapter in American history, Kansas was intentionally settled by abolitionists. People who came west because they were morally opposed to slavery and sought to outnumber what many Kansans still refer to as the “slavers” of Missouri. The city of Lawrence exists because anti-slavery activists in Massachusetts decided it should.
The university built its mascot out of the proud heritage of the free-state guerrillas that called themselves the Jayhawkers, who fought the pro-slavery Bushwhackers who invaded Kansas because they were pro-slavery. While Missouri never joined the Confederacy, it wanted to stay in the Union as a pro-slavery state and spent the Civil War fighting nasty battles inside its own borders and next door in Kansas.
The men who burned Lawrence and killed innocent children rode out of that mess back to Missouri. So when Kansans call this rivalry good versus evil, they aren’t just dressing up a football game in modern language. They are referencing a real and ugly past that hasn’t been forgotten, not even on 9/11. More on that later.
Kansas can’t exactly claim clean hands either. John Brown retaliated by pulling five men out of their cabins at Pottawatomie and killed them with broadswords. He’s featured in the hype video anyway. Nobody’s ever claimed Kansas was gentle. I grew up there, and gentle still isn’t a word I or anyone else would use. What Kansas claims is that it was right, and that claim holds up pretty precisely. And almost all of the discomfort of the last 48 hours has come from people who would just as soon it didn’t.
Now this game is such a heated rivalry of such deep hatred that the schools decided to stop playing one another for a good deal of time. And this is just the second time the Border War series has restarted. And things were ugly from the jump, regardless of the video. Before kickoff, his players flipped off the Kansas student section. With 34 seconds left and a 17-point lead, Missouri’s backup quarterback threw into the end zone rather than kneel. Fair play. It’s a football game, and I cannot condemn that for poor sportsmanship, because if the situation were reversed, I'd want to do the same.
Missouri Coach Eli Drinkwitz is probably the best avatar for this bizarre reframing of history, and afterward he said he drove up the score because he was embarrassed for Kansas and wanted to embarrass them back. He called the video weird and insisted everybody has a complicated past. (Point of order: not every state has a kill innocent children to advance slavery past.) He also bragged about Missouri had left Kansas bleeding again, which is sort of bizarre given that the coach had objected to the invocation of Quantrill, then invoked Quantrill, from where it happened. He also said it was 9/11 (Never forget) and the country needed unity, ostensibly by forgetting about his state’s past treasonous terrorism. Then he said he didn’t much care if the rivalry continued. He can go fuck himself.
Kansas coach Lance Leipold was asked about all of it and said he hadn’t heard the remarks and that how Drinkwitz coaches is Drinkwitz’s business. That’s a man who knows how to take the high road and understands he’d already been handed the better end of the exchange. It’s the Kansas way.
National sportswriter Pat Forde, who is a Missouri grad and writes about college football) called the video “crap.” His objection was that Kansas had taken 160-year-old tragic history and attached it to a football game, associating one side with slavery in the process. Nine hours later, he posted the final score under #RightSideOfHistory meets #RightSideoftheScoreboard.
Warning: Your head might spin from the clear hypocrisy and moral contradiction in these two tweets read in sequence. The first says the moral frame has no business here, while the second only works if it does. As I replied on X, you can take the douchebag out of Missouri, but you cannot take the Missouri out of the douchebag. He can also go fuck himself.
Here’s the consistent theme about all the pushback the video received. Not one person argued the history, not Drinkwitz, Forde or the Missouri fans in the replies. They argued about manners, insisting that the video was classless and the timing was in poor taste, which is an argument you make when you don’t have the facts on your side. There isn’t a version of “Missouri wasn’t a slave state” that anyone can say out loud because it’s not true.
The poor taste is the coach, columnist, and reply section that’d insist the subject should never come up, and their bizarre standard that treats the mere mention of slavery as somehow worse than slavery itself.
Missouri won the game 38-21 fair and square, as they were clearly the better team. Congratulations to them, but it doesn’t change the history. Missouri fans who think the result somehow exonerates them over this controversy reveal more about them than any hype video ever could.
The teams aren’t scheduled to play again until 2031, which is now in question. If they DO play again, the people doing the Quantrill bit will have plenty of time to figure out which side of history they’d like to be on.
I’d much rather Kansas won the game, but I feel better being on the right side of history even if it means being on the wrong side of the scoreboard.
I hate to even drive through that damned state.
Does football have to be politicized too?