Kansas’ Border War hype video spent Thursday night resurrecting Bleeding Kansas, John Brown, and 160-year-old dead Kansans to sell a rivalry game as a referendum on good and evil. Then Missouri beat Kansas 38-21, and the only referendum that actually landed was the one on the scoreboard.
No. 23 Missouri didn’t even need a full game to make the point stick. The Missouri Tigers and Kansas Jayhawks were tied 14-14 at halftime inside David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium before Missouri’s defense turned the third quarter into the kind of stretch a program quietly deletes from its own highlight reel. Robert Woodyard Jr. forced a fumble on one Kansas possession and intercepted quarterback Isaiah Marshall on the very next one, and both turnovers became Missouri touchdowns within minutes.
That’s the sequence the video didn’t account for: two possessions, two turnovers, two scores, one rivalry decided before the fourth quarter even started.
Marshall finished 168 yards passing with two touchdowns and two interceptions, adding 23 rushing yards on 20 carries that mostly just absorbed hits. Austin Simmons threw for 292 yards and three touchdowns spread across Donovan Olugbode and Cayden Lee, and Jamal Roberts broke off a 64-yard touchdown run, the longest of his career, the kind of play that makes a pregame “we are evil” narrative look especially silly in real time. Xai’Shaun Edwards scored off one of Woodyard’s turnovers too.
Missouri improved to 2-0. Kansas dropped to 1-1, and one of those two losses shipped with its own marketing campaign.
Eli Drinkwitz didn’t dunk on the video so much as calmly explain why it embarrassed everyone attached to it. “I was disappointed in the rivalry, the turn that it took today,” he said afterward, adding that airing Civil War imagery “especially on 9/11, when we need more unity now than ever before… was bizarre to me.” Then came the line that’s going to follow Kansas around all week: “I was embarrassed for them, to be honest.”
I’ve reread that quote three times now and it doesn’t get less brutal — that’s the winning coach pausing to feel sorry for the other program’s marketing department.
Drinkwitz wasn’t gentle with his own guys either, flagging “undisciplined penalties” and special teams that “were not good tonight.” Kansas coach Lance Leipold offered the more clinical postmortem: “Just some things happened — a couple of things you just can’t do if you play ranked teams.” Two coaches described the same 17-point loss, and only one of them felt the need to dress it up as a referendum on history first.
The internet noticed the gap between the hype and the box score almost immediately:
https://twitter.com/stoolpresidente/status/2098391877049364633
Kansas hasn’t beaten Missouri once since the Border War returned from a 14-year hiatus in 2025, and Friday made it five in a row — the fifth straight meeting the “evil” program has walked into Lawrence and left with the win. Somewhere on the rest of the ranked Saturday slate, a team that trusted its own roster just went out and played football instead of writing a screenplay.
Kansas didn’t need 160 years of borrowed history if its offense could do the talking on its own. It just proved, in the only language anyone actually respects, that it can’t.
