The anatomy of a college football rivalry: What makes a heated feud?

For more Rivalry Week content, check out FanSided's Ultimate Guide to College Football Rivalries, an in-depth and interactive look at the deep traditions, rich history, iconic venues and memorable moments of college football's biggest rivalries.

It’s the high holiest of college football weekends. No, not conference championship Saturday or the Rose Bowl. It’s a cold weekend in November, when passion rears its intense head and grudges amplify. When deep-seated traditions are celebrated. When the gridiron welcomes centuries-old foes. When brass axes and buckets and trophies hold power. When teams compete for bragging rights, history and sometimes, championship implications. Rivalry Week. 

Some games simply mean more than others. But what differentiates this weekend from any other in-season competition? Conference realignment has challenged the existence of 100-plus-year-old matchups, but whether you play during Rivalry Week or earlier in the season, the question remains: What makes a rivalry? 

The makings of a college football rivalry

There is neither a uniform definition nor a universal understanding of rivalries across sports. The term rival tends to be tossed around by fans and marketers alike. Technically, it’s defined as a competitor that a sports team or athlete wants to defeat. But that simply won’t do. So Joe Cobbs and David Tyler, two business professors, decided to measure rivalries on a statistical basis. 

Through their research lab, Know Rivalry, the two first established 10 main ingredients on which to base a rivalry. And while not all need to exist, most will. The most important ingredient, they found, is consistency of play. Rivalries are sustained through regular, high-stakes competition over time. Without this, the rivalry loses its significance. Yale-Princeton played first in 1873. Lafayette-Lehigh in 1884. Minnesota-Wisconsin in 1890. Clemson-South Carolina in 1896. And for many more college football rivalries, 100-plus years of play, continuous or not, is there to back it all up. 

Consistency of play is one of four ingredients within the category they call “conditional conflict.” The other three — conspicuous characters, conspicuous moments and competitiveness (meaning there’s either comparable success, historically or recently, or an uncertainty of outcome) — are also vital to the making of a rivalry. 

“Conspicuous characters and conspicuous moments both rank really high,” says Know Rivalry’s Joe Cobbs, an associate business professor at Northern Kentucky University. “And that's because what separates a rival from a competitor is that narrative over time. And any good narrative that's going to persist has to have memorable characters, and it has to have these specific moments.”

One hundred-plus years of moments etched into rivalry lore is not uncommon. Chris Davis’s kick six in the 2013 Iron Bowl. Desmond Howard's 93-yard punt return before hitting the Heisman in 1991. The Bush Push. These moments resonate still. 

“I like to think those elements are particularly salient in college football rivalries,” says Cobbs. “The amount of nuance with which fans can remember things that happened 30 years ago — it's particularly prevalent in college football rivalries."

Why is that? Because college football rivalries have such a long narrative to them, and they're generational. "Yes, that does happen in pro sports," says Cobbs, "but in college, it’s a different level. Maybe because it’s not only about what happens on the field, it's about the institution, even broader, it's about the state itself. And for people, it becomes part of their own narrative.” 

Shared — and disparate — values

While the above are essential to a rivalry, the other ingredients can create different manifestations of one. Shared similarities, including spatial proximity, synonymous values and shared supply pool (recruiting, coaching competition) can add to a rivalry. 

“This goes back to sibling rivalry, aspects of psychology,” says Cobbs. “You want to differentiate yourself. It's just a part of our feelings as individuals — we don't want to be in the same spot. We want to have some individualism. We have to exert our distinction by being a better program.”

On the other end, deep differences can build a rivalry. Dominance, discrimination (perceived preferential treatment one way or the other) and disparate values play a role.

“There are institutions that have two different values or two different sort of origin stories,” says Cobbs. This is most obvious when you think about rivalries between Oregon and Oregon State or Virginia and Virginia Tech or Ole Miss and Mississippi State, where one institution was founded as an agricultural or military school and the other to serve medical, law, liberal arts or business students — it's white collar vs. blue collar, lawyers vs. farmers, flagship vs. ag school.

“They've been different since they were founded. And they were founded intentionally to be different, to serve two different groups of people within the state. But that history has changed throughout time. And those disparate values create this tension within the rivalry,” says Cobbs.

Intensity of college football rivalries 

Over the past 10 years, Know Rivalry has surveyed more than 30,000 college football fans to measure their perception of rivalry and offer insight into their feelings and reactions toward rivals. They ask respondents to allocate 100 “rivalry points” across opponents of their favorite team — all 100 can go to one team, or they can be distributed across multiple rivalries. By adding up the points allocated from each team in a rivalry, they are able to use data to measure rivalry intensity. 

By this criteria, the top or “most intense” rivalries aren’t necessarily the most famous. They aren’t necessarily the ones with the baddest blood. They are often ones without another significant team to pull points away from. Arizona-Arizona State, Western Michigan-Central Michigan, Ohio State-Michigan and Army-Navy top the intensity chart. 

And sure, any list of the greatest rivalries or most intense rivalries of all time will inevitably be disputed—Uncle Denny simply cannot imagine a world in which Alabama-Auburn is considered less intense than Arizona-Arizona State. But by this criteria, the data is the data. (Alabama fans, for instance, dish out 50 rivalry points to Auburn. Compare that to Ohio State fans, who give Michigan 88.5 rivalry points.) 

“I think in college sports, there is much more of a focus on one particular opponent or sometimes two in a few places, which can make them more intense compared to professional sports,” says Cobbs. “NFL fans may list every team in their division as a rival, they're spreading that intensity over more teams, and the rivalries are often based on who is the best team at a certain time. In college sports, while there is a bit of fluidity, it's pretty enduring.”

Schadenfreude 

In the case of Know Rivalry data, intensity does not equal hatred or hostility. One data point they collect through their survey though is “schadenfreude,” the German word for finding joy in other people's misfortune. 

According to Cobbs, there’s often a higher level of respect in collegiate rivalries. Part of that is history; part is shared status. “The rivalry itself elevates the status of both universities and teams," says Cobbs.

"This idea of what social psychologists would call collective identification, meaning you're identifying together with the rivalry, doesn’t happen in professional sports. There's not as much respect for the other side in professional sports, and there's more schadenfreude.” 

There is schadenfreude in college sports — Know Rivalry measures it — and there's certainly trash talk, “but there's also this notion that 'I don't want something really terrible to happen to my rival. I want it to remain competitive because my status is connected to their status,” Cobbs says. 

Can rivalries hold up in a world of conference realignment? 

This is a legitimate concern. Conference realignment threatens the stability of long-standing rivalries. Without consistent competition, rivalries can inevitably fade. According to Cobbs, a really strong rivalry can withstand close to a decade of not playing, but without direct competition, that rivalry will fade out.

It's no secret that heritage has been lost. The Bedlam game between Oklahoma and Oklahoma State is no more. The Civil War between Oregon and Oregon State is gone. Mizzou vs. Kansas has been over for more than 10 years. And plenty more are in serious jeopardy.

These longstanding, built-on-tradition rivalries are part of what separates collegiate sports from professional sports. Can losing rivalries, especially due to conference realignment, lead to an identity crisis for college football? Perhaps. But this rivalry week, we're focusing on what we do know: Deep-seated traditions and 100-plus years of matchups makes for a special weekend.