The Anatomy of In-State College Rivalries

College sports, as you might know, fascinate us here at The Barking Crow. And one thing that we talk about a lot privately is the dynamics of intrastate rivalries, where the relationships between various schools can tell you a lot about the state’s culture as a whole.

We’ll go through all fifty states in this, but we wanted to start with a quick definition of the “Classic” college rivalry.

The Classic intrastate rivalry, in our view, is one in which there are two major public schools which regularly compete with one another, and there are no other athletically significant schools in the state. One school is liberal. The other is more conservative. The liberal school focuses on more white-collar training. The other is more blue-collar. The liberal school is a better school academically. The more conservative school has an agricultural focus.

Part of what makes these rivalries so fun is that they have these intrinsic David & Goliath natures to them, and that they’re a healthier manifestation of culture wars than what we see in politics or on social media. There are stakes, but the stakes are personal and emotional. That’s our guess, anyway. We aren’t sociologists.

With that, let’s go through these, state by state, visiting thirteen categories along the way.

Insignificance

• Maine
• New Hampshire
• Vermont
• New Jersey
• Alaska

With all due respect to Rutgers (all that is due, not more than is due), and with an acknowledgement that we might be missing something with hockey up in New England and Alaska, these just aren’t big college sports states. The University of Vermont might be a Single Power (we’ll get to those), but it’s not something in which there appears, to our eyes, to be statewide athletic pride.

Anarchy

• New York
• Illinois
• Colorado
• Nevada
• California

There is no central rivalry in these states, to our knowledge.

We’re the least confident in our assessments of Nevada and Colorado, but we don’t get the idea people from CU-Boulder and Colorado State have too much hate between them, and we don’t get the idea much is happening between Nevada and UNLV these days.

In New York, the NYC/Upstate divide makes it difficult without a major college football program in the city to play against Syracuse. Basketball is more vague, and Syracuse’s biggest Old Big East™ rivalries weren’t limited to St. John’s (nor did that encompass the state all that much).

In Illinois, nobody’s all that good at anything. Northwestern’s naturally exclusionary, the University of Illinois is somewhat exclusionary and also just kind of impotent, something that shows up when they struggle to recruit Chicago or when Loyola got significant support when the two faced off last March but it wasn’t in a “take those big greedy bastards down” way that it might be in, say, Ohio.

In California, there are pockets of conflict, but only pockets. The state is too big for college sports, and unlike Texas, there is too much to do.

Ehh, I Guess It’s Something.

• Massachusetts
• Pennsylvania

The fact I follow college hockey minimally and know about the Beanpot, and know that there’s a BC/BU divide within it, makes me give Massachusetts the benefit of the doubt. With Penn State/Pitt, each school seems to have something bigger going on, and the rivalry naturally excludes the most populous part of the state, where the Big 5 isn’t doing too much these days.

The Ingredients Are There.

• Rhode Island

Providence vs. Rhode Island has the makings of a brutal college basketball rivalry. Cincinnati/Xavier-style, for those who know the reference. We fully support all efforts to escalate things to that level.

Single Power

• Texas
• Louisiana
• Nebraska
• Wisconsin
• Ohio
• Arkansas
• West Virginia
• Connecticut
• Missouri
• Maryland
• Idaho
• Hawaii
• Delaware
• Wyoming

We will not apologize to Texas A&M and Texas Tech. We will apologize to Delaware State, who’s just playing a different game from Delaware (were Delaware’s football program not so successful at the FCS level, and were Maine’s more successful and its men’s basketball program something that existed as more than a technicality, those two might be flipped here). We are least certain about Idaho on this list, but our impression is that Boise State is the show in town.

I’m curious how much of these setups are the products, in part, of long-passed political decisions. Presumably, these states could have opened an alternative to their flagship institution. They chose not to.

Anyway, in each of these states, if you’re a college sports fan you’re overwhelmingly likely to support one specific school. There are varying levels of significance (the Packers top Wisconsin, everything professional tops Mizzou, I don’t think anything in the world tops Nebraska for its fans). But that’s the power structure. No in-state rivalry of note, even if schools like Marquette and A&M might whine that there is (yeah, to be fair, Texas could be in the last section on here—and would be were we not just a few weeks removed from A&M sniffling all over the SEC expansion voting booth).

Classic

• Kansas
• Mississippi
• Michigan
• Oklahoma
• Virginia
• Iowa
• Oregon
• Washington
• Alabama

These are so fun. So, so fun. Everything about them is a blast. There are stakes! And while in the case of, say, Oklahoma and Michigan, the big brother’s “biggest rival” is across state lines, that almost helps, by adding this element of existential dread to the big guys when, like has been happening for the last couple decades in Michigan, the blue-collar kids kick their asses.

My favorite two examples are Mississippi, where Ole Miss reeks of imitations and realizations of aristocratic wealth, and Kansas, where friends of mine who went to K-State once told me, “If you live in Kansas and you aren’t in Wichita—which is kind of its own thing—you’re either a Kansas person or a K-State person, and you just don’t interact with the other.” To hear them tell it, the school wasn’t chosen, you just were that kind of person.

Single Power Under Threat

• Tennessee
• Minnesota

Tennessee’s bad enough, not central enough, and in a state with legitimate-enough potential foes (Memphis, Vanderbilt in theory) that it’s at risk of losing its Single Power status.

In Minnesota, hockey complicates, but my impression is that it does so by giving Minnesota-Duluth and St. Cloud State some heft. I went to the high school state hockey tournament there one spring with a friend who grew up in Edina, and he talked about neighbors of his who were legitimately spiteful towards people from outside the Twin Cities, viewing them as lower class. In other words, could be on its way to a Classic setup if everyone could get it together.

City/Suburbs

• Georgia
• Kentucky

The UGA/Georgia Tech rivalry intrigues me because Atlanta is so core to Georgia Tech’s identity, despite Georgia Tech not being particularly representative of Atlanta. I don’t know if City/Suburbs is the best way to describe this, but there’s something there, and it has echoes in the Kentucky/Louisville rivalry.

Classic, but Flipped

• South Carolina

Clemson, the land grant school, is narrowly ranked as the better school academically in this one, and they’re playing in a whole different strata than the Gamecocks at the moment if you exclude women’s basketball, which I would surmise does not push a ton of pride throughout the Palmetto State.

The Holy War

• Utah

Utah/BYU has stakes, and at its best, those stakes are greater than we could ever conceptualize as non-Utahns.

Classic, but JV

• New Mexico
• Montana
• North Dakota

Grand Forks is artsier than Fargo and I believe has the better hockey program. Montana State’s the land grant school. New Mexico State’s the land grant school, it’s out in the desert, and it doesn’t have the basketball history of UNM.

Classic, but Flipped, but JV

• South Dakota

South Dakota State’s much more prominent athletically and is also the land grant/agriculture school.

Two-State Solution

• Arizona

Is there really much animosity between Arizona and Arizona State? Maybe so, maybe I’m missing it. But it seems like everyone is having too much fun over there to get all that riled up at one another. Plus, they each kind of have their own lane—Arizona’s traditionally the basketball school, ASU’s more geared towards football.

The Complicated Ones

• North Carolina
• Florida
• Indiana

Miami, Notre Dame, and Duke shake things up. I’m not sure I fully understand the dynamics in Florida between the U, FSU, and the Gators. There are elements of the Georgia Tech situation in Indiana, where Purdue is *such* an engineering school. There are also elements of the Flip there because Purdue’s the better school on the whole. Notre Dame’s geographic place and IU’s focus on basketball seems to neuter most animosity between those two, if not all of it. A little bit of Purdue vs. The World here, with Purdue/Notre Dame rather inconsequential outside of certain lanes.

Finally, North Carolina, which is the most fun because UNC/NC State would be a great Classic one of these but UNC gets its stuck-up nature covered by Duke being so outrageously self-pleased, which in turn makes NC State look even more blue-collar. Everyone is such a good foil for everyone else, and they’re all so close to one another geographically. It’s beautiful.

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If we missed the mark on some of these, or if you just disagree, please let us know, because we want to know. We love this stuff.