In case you are unaware of the details:
After the first two decades of MU-KU football games on Thanksgiving Day in Kansas City, the venue was moved, due in large part to severe critics of football within KU, including a professor who feared that the program had come to stand "for brutality, for trickery; for paid players, for profanity, for betting before games and for drinking after them.” The university came very close to abolishing football in 1910. Football at Kansas was saved when the Missouri Valley Conference instituted rules intended to deemphasize the importance of football at its member universities, including a mandate that all intercollegiate games be played on college campuses.
The first on-campus contest between the two schools was played in Columbia in 1911. The end of the Kansas City Thanksgiving Day tradition led to the start of a new ritual. Prior to the 1911 game, MU’s football coach and athletics director, Chester Brewer, sent postcards to three hundred former Missouri football players inviting them to Columbia for the game against Kansas: “Come on home, you Missouri M men (football lettermen)…Come back and shake hands with your old pals and other old M men and help beat the Jayhawkers." This 1911 game was the start of Missouri’s homecoming tradition, and Kansas followed suit in 1912, declaring the game against the Tigers in Lawrence their inaugural homecoming. For decades, the annual KU-MU game served as the homecoming game for the host school.
https://digital.shsmo.org/digital/collection/mhr/id/57018/rec/2
After the first two decades of MU-KU football games on Thanksgiving Day in Kansas City, the venue was moved, due in large part to severe critics of football within KU, including a professor who feared that the program had come to stand "for brutality, for trickery; for paid players, for profanity, for betting before games and for drinking after them.” The university came very close to abolishing football in 1910. Football at Kansas was saved when the Missouri Valley Conference instituted rules intended to deemphasize the importance of football at its member universities, including a mandate that all intercollegiate games be played on college campuses.
The first on-campus contest between the two schools was played in Columbia in 1911. The end of the Kansas City Thanksgiving Day tradition led to the start of a new ritual. Prior to the 1911 game, MU’s football coach and athletics director, Chester Brewer, sent postcards to three hundred former Missouri football players inviting them to Columbia for the game against Kansas: “Come on home, you Missouri M men (football lettermen)…Come back and shake hands with your old pals and other old M men and help beat the Jayhawkers." This 1911 game was the start of Missouri’s homecoming tradition, and Kansas followed suit in 1912, declaring the game against the Tigers in Lawrence their inaugural homecoming. For decades, the annual KU-MU game served as the homecoming game for the host school.
https://digital.shsmo.org/digital/collection/mhr/id/57018/rec/2
Last edited:
