Best Game of the Year
Tonight at 8 p.m., MU takes on Illinois in the annual “Busch Braggin’ Rights” game in St. Louis.
Between all sports, MU, Columbia College, random high school junk, I probably attend 100 sporting events a year. A big win, or a surprising upset, or something spectacular can pop up, but for predictable fantasticness, you can mark your calendar for this game every year.
The two teams are historically relatively good, relatively even, and relatively close together geographically. There’s normally a player or two on either team who played against the other guys in high school, or wanted to go to the other school but wasn’t recruited by them, or something. Add in the end of the semester, the ‘start’ of Christmas vacation for a lot of people, and you get the perfect combination of rivalry and revelry.
The crowd is almost always evenly split between MU and ILL fans, meaning half the joint is always happy and the other half is always feeling cheated. Both halves are nervous, based on the crazy history of comebacks and letdowns in this game.
All in all, good times. Starts tonight at 8 on ESPN. I’ll be sitting mid-court, about 10 rows up. I rock, but not as much as this game.
On a side note, screw ku.