Look: Farmageddon Outperformed OSU-BYU With Big 12 Berth on the Line
Last week was the perfect ending to a wild and wacky regular season, as wins from Oklahoma and Texas on Friday made the Oklahoma State vs. BYU game the deciding factor in the Big 12 race.
A win and Oklahoma State moved on to its second Big 12 Championship appearance in three years. A loss and Oklahoma would’ve gotten back to the peak of the mountaintop that it had been perched on for so long in the conference. Well, in a double-overtime thriller, it was Oklahoma State who advanced, beating the Cougars 40-34.
Not only were fans of OSU and BYU watching the game, but Oklahoma and Texas fans watched with bated breath to see how things would play out. The game performed well in the rating, with 2.39M viewers and a rating of 1.2 on ABC. Despite all of that though, the classic between the Cougars and Cowboys was significantly outperformed by one of the Big 12’s greatest rivalries; a rivalry that has been played annually for over a century without exception.
Iowa State vs. Kansas State, or so eloquently dubbed Farmageddon thanks to both schools’ affluence of agriculture, is perhaps the most underrated rivalry in all of college football, and even the Big 12 appears to undervalue it. Instead of keeping ISU-KSU a protected rivalry, the conference recently decided to end a streak that has been going since 1917 with the teams not facing off it 2027. Based on television numbers, that appears to be a mistake.
The Cyclones and Wildcats clash in the late November snow brought in 3.29M viewers and a rating of 1.8, tying it with Texas Tech vs. Texas (3.77M) for the highest-rated game of the weekend for the Big 12.
Now, it’s totally feasible to have Kansas and Kansas State be a protected rivalry, as the Sunflower Showdown is a big-time matchup for the folks in Kansas every year, but the exclusion of Farmageddon from the annual matchups is a total oversight from the league, and perhaps its games like this that will be enough for the decision makers to revisit their mistake.
Ask the people of Ames and Manhattan and you’ll quickly find that these two teams have a fierce and respectful rivalry that puts the best that the Big 12 has to offer on display. After all, where else will you find two land-grant universities that play great football every year and seemingly never fail to live up to the hype in a rivalry game?
There’s still time to fix this Big 12, and now, you see that there’s more than just a few reasons to make it work.
