By Carron J. Phillips
Kansas tried to run some pregame misdirection on Missouri. It “kinda” worked. Not on account of poor execution but because of hypocrisy in the play call.
Consider this column a penalty flag thrown on Kansas’s glaring double standards.
Last Thursday, as the Missouri Tigers made the trip to Lawrence for the first time in 21 years for a rivalry game, the Jayhawks’ pregame hype video took social media by storm.
Creating content to ignite a fanbase and raise the stakes of a big game is typical in sports. However, Kansas took things a little too far. Instead of focusing solely on football, two predominantly white institutions in the heartland of America turned the matchup into the “Who Treats Black People Better Bowl,” disguised as “The Border War.” The video, captioned “It is that deep,” used a theme of “heroes and villains,” explaining the nature of their rivalry as being fueled by “hatred passed down through generations” with roots reaching back to the Civil War, “when blood was spilled over what you believed in, and what side you stood on.”
In jest, the video was passionate, fanatical sports propaganda. But, in earnest, the Jayhawks put themselves on moral high ground by attempting to chide Missouri for having been a slave state. However, given today’s circumstances at both schools, the clip wound up being nothing more than the pot calling the kettle black.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and offices have been eliminated at both universities. One school claimed superior ethical standards because of a war based on ideologies around owning Black people, but both schools are now co-conspirators of oppression and cowardice. It is what they refer to in football as “unsportsmanlike conduct.”
Last summer, the Kansas Board of Regents issued directives to state universities that essentially eliminated anything connected to DEI. Back in April, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, signed a bill that prohibited public colleges from requiring students to take DEI and critical race theory (CRT) courses. A few months ago, the state’s board of regents defined CRT as that which “promotes acceptance’ of the view that racism is systemic in society rather than presenting the theory as ‘a subject of scholarly, historical, or legal study.’ The board explicitly excluded broader discussions of race, racism, and civil rights history from the definition,” according to a report from Higher Ed Dive.
Excuse me if I find this laughable, as the school that bent the knee to ridiculous anti-DEI mandates created by thin-skinned racists dared to lay claim to and feature abolitionist John Brown in the hype video. Brown killed pro-slavery supporters and was eventually hanged for treason after leading a raid on a federal arsenal in Virginia in hopes of arming enslaved Black people with weapons.
On the opposite side of the field, to no surprise, Missouri disbanded all things DEI in 2024. Last month, the University of Missouri Kansas City even suspended Dr. Kim Johnson — a Black woman — for indicating that DEI programs still existed in the statewide university systems in a video that was posted online. Ironically, in 2015, a group of Black football players at Mizzou led a successful boycott over the mishandling of racial incidents that occurred on campus, leading to the resignation of then-school president Tim Wolfe.
Since 2016, Missouri hasn’t had more than 2,048 Black students enrolled at any given time — in a student body of 28,000. Kansas’s undergraduate Black student rate sits at a measly 4.3 percent, less than Asian (5.8 percent) and Hispanic (11.3 percent) enrollment numbers.
Though the pregame video might have been an attempt to explain the animosity between these two states and programs, it also revealed an underlying issue: neither institution seems particularly committed to supporting its Black students, who make up the majority of the players on their football teams.
“I’m just glad that this whole right vs. wrong bullcrap that was started just got settled on a football field. Because it’s a football game. It’s a football game,” Missouri head coach Eli Drinkwitz said. “It’s an American football game that people come to love to watch and cheer for their teams, it’s not any deeper than that. I get there’s a past to it, but why are we stirring that bullcrap up?… This country needs unity now more than ever. And I was embarrassed for them, to be honest, and that’s why I tried to embarrass them at the end.”
The Tigers won the game 38-21, but neither team truly emerged victorious in the greater context of societal issues. When you base a rivalry off the strength of America’s deadliest war that was fought over America’s greatest sin only to wind up taking part in the next evolution of the same evil, you still wind up losing.
Carron J. Phillips is an award-winning journalist who writes on race, culture, social issues, politics, and sports. He hails from Saginaw, Michigan, and is a graduate of Morehouse College and Syracuse University. Follow his personal Substack to keep up with more of his work.
Coach Drinkwitz got it wrong when he said there was a past. No, it’s a game, and it needs to be put in its proper perspective. It’s a GAME, it’s entertainment, and that’s all it is.