Kansas kicked off the run-up to Friday’s game with Missouri by posting a new hype video earlier this week, and the clip quickly turned a rivalry buildup into a controversy. In the video, Kansas called Missouri evil and used slavery imagery, a line that pushed the old Border War feud well past ordinary sports trash talk.
The timing matters because Kansas and Missouri are set to meet on Friday, reviving a rivalry that dates to 1891 and was renamed Border Showdown in 2004. The school’s video reached for the history of the matchup, but it did so in a way that tied present-day football promotion to Missouri’s Civil War-era status as a slave state, a move that is drawing attention far beyond the game itself.
The sharpest part of the clip is not just the insult. It is the context Kansas chose to attach to it. Most of the Mizzou players featured in the video are black, and that detail makes the slavery reference land harder than a standard pregame jab. The rivalry has always carried bad blood, but Kansas’s decision to frame Missouri as evil through that lens turned a football tease into something more loaded and harder to defend.
That is why the backlash is growing now, before the teams even take the field. Beau Pribula, Missouri’s quarterback, is part of the matchup Kansas is selling, along with Yasin Willis of Kansas and Damon Wilson II of Missouri. Even from a distance, the message is plain: this was meant to energize fans, but the execution invited criticism by dragging Civil War history and slavery into a game-week video.
The next flashpoint comes on Friday, when Kansas and Missouri meet and the conversation shifts from a social-media clip to the field. If Kansas wanted the video to reopen an old rivalry, it succeeded. What it also did was remind people that some lines are drawn for a reason, even in a feud as old as this one.
