The KU-Mizzou showdown – and long-time rivalry – are getting the attention of news outlets across the country this week. The Wall Street Journal gets in on the action today._Fans “go back to the history books and start calling people names for things that started 150 years ago,” says Kevin Worley, a Kansas City-based documentary filmmaker who isn’t immune to that tendency himself. A die-hard Missouri fan, Mr. Worley suspects that “there’s this ancestral hatred of Kansas bred in me” by a lineage traceable to soldiers who marched with Confederate general Jo Shelby._The Waco Tribune offers this take:_Since Mark Mangino spent eight years at Kansas State in his climb up the coaching ladder, he just naturally assumed that Kansas’ biggest rival would be the in-state Wildcats.__Wrong.__”When I first arrived at Kansas, they were taking me around to meet various people,” said Mangino, who was hired as the Jayhawks’ head coach in December 2001. “And a lot of the fans would say, ‘I don’t care what you do all year as long as you beat Missouri.’ The Missouri game is very important to the Kansas fan base, and they reminded me of it, too.”_The Austin American-Statesman quotes Al Bohl, the former KU athletic director, in its story._”I don’t think anybody could have predicted that here we are, at the end of the season, and Kansas has a chance at a football national championship,” Al Bohl said.__Bohl, now a novelist, served as Kansas’ athletic director from 2001 to 2003 and jump-started the Jayhawks’ program by hiring Coach Mark Mangino from Bob Stoops’ staff at Oklahoma. In six seasons, Mangino has built the team from winless in the Big 12 to college football’s main stage.__And there, KU will face its Border War rival in a 116-year-old series in which the animosity ranks with Michigan-Ohio State or Alabama-Auburn. The animosity dates to 1863 when Confederate crazy William Quantrill led a band of raiders from Missouri into Lawrence. There, they slaughtered more than 150 innocents and burned homes and landmarks .__”It’s been contentious since the Civil War,” Bohl said. “The Missouri people and the Kansas people have a lot of reason not to like each other.”_