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"Our Chief Rival And Greatest Friend": The Wku-Murray Athletic Rivalry, Lynn E. Niedermeier

Lynn E. Niedermeier

Since their first football game in 1931 and their first men's basketball game in 1932, WKU and Murray State University have enjoyed a natural, spirited, and at times bitter athletic rivalry. For most of five decades, the schools met in the final game of their football seasons, and in basketball they regularly clashed in Ohio Valley Conference play. Anytime the day of "the Western-Murray game" approached, particularly in the 1950s, administrators struggled to maintain order on their campuses in the face of student pranks, graffiti attacks and other extreme expressions of school loyalty.