Rivalries are one of the best things about college football, and until recently, they were held in high regard as one of the protected pillars that separated this sport from the others.
Unfortunately, conference realignment has threatened to remove the majority of the biggest rivalries in the sport.
There are pockets of light in this time, as Washington and Washington State are still playing for the Apple Cup and Civil War is still going strong between Oregon and Oregon State.
Still, it just doesn’t feel quite the same when there are no conference standings on the line. Regardless of that, rivalries still exist in the sport and some fan bases seem to take certain matchups more seriously than others.
If you ask a team like Michigan who their biggest rival is, the answer is easy: Ohio State. But what about Michigan State? The Spartans and Wolverines are bitter rivals, yet there’s no doubt that Sparty takes a back seat to Brutus in the grand scheme of Michigan’s hatred.
RELATED: Oklahoma State vs. Utah Preview
That’s not the only example of this “Big Brother, Little Brother” complex in rivalries. Texas, LSU, Oklahoma, and Notre Dame all have several teams that would consider them their top rivals, but the feeling isn’t always reciprocated. So, how do you determine each team’s main rival?
Reddit user “Ok_Welcome_6684” appears to have spelled things out very plainly for us here.
As the post reads, all of the rivalry data comes from KnowRivalry.com, which uses fan survey data from each team to determine their biggest rival.
In the Big 12, it appears that things are very cut and dry for some and much more complicated for others.
We took the liberty of cleaning things up for you below.
To be honest, some of these were a bit surprising. TCU fans said Baylor was the bigger rival out of them and SMU, which I would not have guessed.
RELATED: TCU vs. SMU Preview
I thought for sure that Cincinnati-Ohio would be a clearcut in-state rivalry, but it seems Cincy fans view Louisville as the bigger rival.
It was just a surprising to see Kansas fans saying Mizzou was the bigger rivalry still. Yes, the Border War has always been fierce, but the Sunflower Showdown has been all K-State for a long time now.
It’s also interesting that Iowa State and Kansas State both leaned toward their in-state rivalries rather than Farmageddon, which has been highly contested for years.
It looks like Colorado, Oklahoma State, and Texas Tech could have a rivalry-by-proxy situation with the old-school Big 12 teams that they played regularly all leaving the league, and OSU-TTU is already starting to look like a new-school Big 12 rivalry.
