The Case for Bill Roper

Posted on: July 28, 2016 at 21:07:33 CT

Can't make a case if the criteria is quantity, but one can readily make the case that the quality of the job Roper did in his single season at the helm is unsurpassed, especially considering the prior history of the MU program and the long-term effect of the mindset he instilled. Below is an excerpt from an article on the history of the MU-KU football rivalry that appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of the Missouri Historical Review, an article written to rebut a piece by a KU history professor stating there was no factual basis to the popular notion the rivalry was rooted in the Border War.

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Kansas and Missouri quickly became gridiron archrivals. Following just the fifth game of the series, a Missouri student wrote in the university’s yearbook that “Missouri and Kansas are rivals in so many things that each would rather defeat the other than gain victories over all the rest of the world.” The Missouri game was also the most important on the Kansas schedule, as demonstrated by a Kansas newspaper columnist who wrote in 1903, “The Jayhawkers have finished up what might be called practically their preliminary season and now only remains the grand climax to the 1903 football year in the thirteenth Kansas-Missouri struggle in Kansas City.” This is not to say that games with other regional schools were not intense and highly competitive, but they were never as important to Missouri and Kansas as the annual game in Kansas City, as illustrated by MU’s approach to the 1909 season.

Bill Roper, the football coach at Princeton, was hired as MU’s coach in 1909. Soon after arriving in Columbia, Roper proclaimed, “I have come to Missouri with one object in view. That is to defeat Kansas.” Beating Kansas quickly became the talk of the entire university. Following a speech by MU’s athletic director, Clark W. Hetherington, on what it would take to beat Kansas, every department of the university conducted mass meetings in which professors and student leaders attempted to whip up the support of the student body. The week of mass meetings culminated with a Friday night gathering of fifteen hundred students (approximately half of the entire student body), who unanimously voted to start a “Beat Kansas” club.[ii]

The focus on the Kansas game carried into the season. Missouri’s win against Monmouth in the season opener was discussed in terms of what it meant to MU’s chances of beating KU in the Thanksgiving Day finale in Kansas City. By the time the game arrived, Missouri had built an undefeated record of six wins and one tie. But Kansas, entering the game with an eighteen-game winning streak and having limited the Tigers to a total of nine points in their previous seven meetings, was heavily favored. Roper’s team nevertheless prevailed by a score of 12 to 6 and became Missouri Valley Conference champions. Tiger fans celebrated in wild fashion. “At the Jayhawker headquarters the invaders built a bonfire on the street car tracks in front of the hotel and before the very eyes of the heart-sore Kansans plunged them into horrible humiliation by burning a turkey that was labeled ‘Jayhawk.’” The importance of the 1909 win to the MU student body was memorialized in the next yearbook, in which there was no need to even name the foe: “There was a minute last Thanksgiving Day when that team was on our one-yard line. To those who prayed, to those who swore, to those who yelled, to those who fought for Missouri during that one minute, this book is dedicated.”[iii]

So what was behind MU’s singular focus on KU? In a preseason pep talk to his students, University of Missouri School of Journalism dean Walter Williams spelled it out: “The annual football game between the University of Missouri and Kansas is but a continuation of the border warfare of earlier times.” This historical perspective was later reinforced by Bill Hollenback, Missouri’s coach for the 1910 season, who recalled, “Those Missouri-Kansas followers did not know the Civil War was over. For them the annual Thanksgiving game was a continuance of the struggle between the sections. It was the Bushwhacker versus the Jayhawker when those State universities clashed on the field.” The belief that the intensity of athletic competitions between the schools could be traced to the Border War was echoed a few years later on the other side of the border by Kansas basketball coach Phog Allen.[iv]

. John M. Burnam, “The Football Season of 1895,” University of Missouri Savitar, 1896, 69; “K.U. and M.U. Football,” Emporia (KS) Gazette, November 25, 1903.

[ii]. Columbia University Missourian, September 27, 1909, 1; “A ‘Beat Kansas’ Club Organized,” Columbia University Missourian, October 10, 1909, 4.

[iii]. “Driver Is Pessimistic,” Columbia University Missourian, October 6, 1909, 3; Rivals! MU vs. KU, A Classic Sports Match-Up since 1891 (Kansas City: Kansas City Star Books, 2005), 25; Savitar, 1910, 7.

[iv]. “Attitude toward Football Changes,” Columbia University Missourian, October 8, 1909, 4; “M.U. Spirit Is Greater than That in East,” Columbia Evening Missourian, October 8, 1921, 5; Forrest C. Allen, Coach “Phog” Allen’s Sports Stories for You and Youth (Lawrence, KS: Allen Press, 1947), 64. In describing the 1922 basketball game in Columbia, Allen stated, “Border warfare of Civil War days between Kansas and Missouri had deeply seared the free-soil and slave-state citizenry’s burning prejudices against each other. Tonight against this emotional background this age-old animosity flamed anew.”