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Missouri Town Wants Kansas To Change Its “Terrorist” Nickname, Kansas Has Best Response Ever

If The Big 12 really is on its last legs, one of the big (and not-much-discussed, at least on a national level) losses would be the dissolution of the Kansas-Missouri conference rivalry. Hopefully the schools would still play each other, but the days when a Missouri-Kansas matchup could determine, say, who had a chance of winning the conference (like it did in 2007) might be over. The intensity of the rivalry itself, though? That, we can’t imagine dying down, and spats like the one currently happening between the town of Osceola, Missouri and KU are a big part of the reason why.

The reasoning behind the disagreement, like the reasoning behind Kansas and Missouri’s bitter rivalry itself, is rooted in the Civil War era. Osceola thinks Kansas should drop its “Jayhawks” nickname. Via the Columbia Daily Tribune, here’s why:

On Sept. 22, 1861, Osceola was a prosperous city of 2,500. The town lived on Osage River commerce and was split between Unionists and secessionists. U.S. Sen. Jim Lane led his band of about 2,000 “jayhawkers” in the Kansas Brigade to the city for a two-day orgy of looting, arson, drunkenness and murder. A dozen men were executed on the town square. When the attackers left — taking away all the property and livestock they could move — the town was a smoking ruin, and fewer than 200 people remained.

The town has never again had as many people as it did before the raid.

Hence “Jayhawk” being an unpopular word around those parts, which led to Osceola demanding Kansas stop “the celebration of this murderous gang of terrorists by an institution of ‘higher education’ in such a brazen and malicious manner.” One might think Kansas would respond that their nickname has nothing to do with celebrating these actions, and that to say it did would be ludicrous. And Kansas did pretty much say that…only the way they put it was way better. Jill Jess, news service director at Kansas, responded to Osceola’s complaint with this:

“A Jayhawk is a blue bird with a red head and a big yellow beak that wears boots. It would be hard to confuse it with anyone with terrorist intent, though we admit we have been terrorizing the Tigers on the basketball court for some time. Tigers have been known to kill people. Bears, too.”

Yes, we also love school-on-school trash talk. Oh, and Osceola also wants Kansas to stop using a capitalized “KU” as an abbreviation, and stop capitalizing its own name (“neither is a proper name or a proper place”), though one Osceolan, Rick Reed, said he doubted Kansas would do anything about it because “they are so arrogant and uppity.” People, Kansas-Missouri is clearly the greatest rivalry IN THE WORLD.

[Eye On College Football]

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