Kansas’ anticlimactic Border War blowout of Mizzou doesn’t diminish meaning of the day
Delicious as this was for Kansas and its fans and distressing as it was for their Missouri counterparts, alas, the game itself 3,577 days in the making was an anticlimactic dud.
Whatever side of the rivalry you’re on, some semblance of drama would have made for theater better befitting the wait … and better to promote the general welfare of the revival of the series.
Instead, nine dormant years since they last played, Kansas and Missouri clearly have grown apart in more ways than one — including in what we saw on the court in KU’s 102-65 victory over Mizzou before a pulsating crowd of 16,300 on Saturday at Allen Fieldhouse.
The outcome was so lopsided that it was hard to assess just how much it was testament to the brilliance of the eighth-ranked Jayhawks (8-1) and how much it was a reflection of the woes of MU (5-5).
One way or another, considering how their mesmerizing previous two meetings had honored the game itself and could have stood the test of time as the appropriate final chapter of a century-plus of feuding, you could make a case Mizzou should have been more careful of what it wished for:
It long sought to keep alive the series KU didn’t want to extend after Mizzou in 2011 made the momentous choice to leave the precarious Big 12 for the Southeastern Conference.
Kansas finally relented (with both this six-game series and a four-game football resumption ahead) and now can bask in bashing MU to start it back.
But this day hardly was just about the game itself, something you perhaps could best understand through the fierce play of KU catalyst Christian Braun.
“I think,” his mother, Lisa, said, “he was trying to make a point.”
We’ll come back to that, though.
Because the biggest point of all was that this day was about something more essential than the dynamics of this game.
This day was about restoring a way of life, really. And at least starting to refill a void. And replenishing a treasured tradition that was a casualty of the chaotic musical chairs of conference realignment.
Blame whoever you want for the vacant, wasted nine years.
Wherever you stand or land on that, it felt like a living, breathing, symbiotic organism suddenly had vanished from the landscape.
So even as Mizzou defected for a place that proclaims “it just means more,” and KU fans liked to say they didn’t care about this game, this all hovered in the air from a series in which you could just feel more.
Or as Braun put it in the days leading up to the game, “It (rivalry) never really died to me, to be honest. I think every year you’d get those comments from people about KU-Mizzou. I don’t think the rivalry ever went away, they (two teams) just haven’t played each other in a bit.”
Indeed, it was profoundly missed from Columbia to Lawrence … and at the epicenter on either side of State Line Road.
If you didn’t know that from when the hurricane-relief exhibition game between them at what was then known as Sprint Center sold out 18,000 seats in minutes in 2017, you knew it from the fever pitch at tipoff (hitting a peak of 116.1 decibels, unless I missed a higher flickering count). The crowd basically sustained that all game, and maybe it was at its peak early in the second half as KU amassed a 31-point lead and again as the Jayhawks approached 100 points.
Afterward, KU coach Bill Self reveled in it but held to a point he’s believed in all along.
“I personally think it doesn’t have the same feel,” he said. “To me, when you play Missouri (in conference games), it (was) such a big game for both teams. But it (was) magnified, because it’s for a bigger picture.
“Today wasn’t for a bigger picture.”
Maybe not. But on the flip side, as Self likes to say, it was all about the game itself. The rivalry itself. Not other implications. Not how it affects the standings.
Just … who won.
Gruesome as it was for Mizzou in the moment, and as much as it illuminates how far the program has to go to make this remotely competitive in the years to come, this still represented a big-picture win for the area and for college basketball.
And it came in a timely way. When I sat in Self’s office in 2013 and we spoke about the demise and potential future of the rivalry, he reckoned that “10 years from” then nobody would view it as meaningful and that another program “will emerge in some way, shape or form that kind of fills that role for both programs.”
That hasn’t happened. But it’s also true that with every passing year it became further in the rear-view mirror and more susceptible to outright extinction.
Perhaps putting that in context, consider that KU’s Dajuan Harris grew up in Columbia but put it this way when asked about how familiar he was with the rivalry.
“I was talking to my grandpa today, and he told me that we went to the last Missouri versus Kansas game,” he said. “But I don’t remember that. I just don’t remember.”
Then, though, there was Braun, who went to Blue Valley Northwest and has spent his whole life in the middle of the rivalry.
His mother, Lisa, starred at Mizzou … as did his uncle, Mike Sandbothe, and aunt Lori. His father, Donny, was a walk-on at KU before transferring to St. Louis University. And then there was his brother Parker, who initially attended MU but transferred to Santa Clara, where he is flourishing.
So Christian came to be driven to play Mizzou, and all the more so because of the family’s belief that Parker “didn’t quite get an opportunity whatsoever” at MU, as Lisa Braun put it Saturday.
“We’ve been a house divided his entire existence; I think tonight was special because he’s protective of his brother,” she said. “I think that’s why Christian was so fired up.”
Braun finished with 13 points. But he had eight of KU’s first 11, accentuated by some mugging and preening, as the Jayhawks established a lead that would only keep growing.
And his dunk off a break made it 38-25 and set KU on a 19-2 run that put the game out of reach for MU early in the second half.
“That’s the most fun I’ve had in my life,” Braun said. “I feel like I was born for it.”
Making him just the right guy at the right time to stand for the rebirth of this.
This story was originally published December 11, 2021 at 7:40 PM with the headline "Kansas’ anticlimactic Border War blowout of Mizzou doesn’t diminish meaning of the day."