Dear Swoop the RedHawk,
I am writing to you because I am hosting your Miami University baseball team in a three-game series starting today, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to reassess our troubled relationship. I think the OU-Miami rivalry is losing the passion it once had. Frankly, the hatred has become one-sided.
Maybe you think you're better than me. Sure, before the last couple years, you outclassed me in athletic competitions. You tried unsuccessfully to revive the old flame by inventing the Battle of the Bricks
a rivalry involving 16 varsity sports and a formula too complex to garner much interest. You won it all four years, but this year the tide might be changing. Anyhow, while you might need good competition to sustain a heated rivalry, my hate is steady and unconditional.
The problem is that you've become complacent. Your pink-shirt-and-khaki-pants-wearing, conformist, self-involved students just don't care about me anymore ' or about any other rival for that matter. For goodness sake, you nearly got ousted from Division 1-A a few years ago for not meeting attendance quotas. Maybe you should see somebody at the health center to treat your terminal lack of school spirit.
You haven't always been ambivalent about me. Remember the good times, when Miami students proudly wore T-shirts with offensive slogans about OU and wouldn't have dared don an Ohio hoodie on your campus? Our mutual antagonism is natural because we have so much in common. We both live in rural college towns in southern Ohio amid a multitude of brick buildings. Our relationship goes back a century. That's not something you can just throw away. You must have had a hard time raising your ire to my former, frumpy self, but since my makeover last year I look more intimidating and slightly crazed perhaps. That should be even more reason to dislike me.
After all we've been through, I still hate you passionately. I have nothing but innate, irrational loathing for you. Why won't you reciprocate? It's nice to see some derogatory comments on your Facebook page. Maybe there's still some hope for us. We have the makings of a first-rate rivalry here, if you were just smart enough to recognize it. But while you continue to look down your beak at me, I'll just have to hate enough for the both of us.
Sincerest regards,
Rufus the Bobcat
Editorials represent the majority opinion of the Post executive editors. 17
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OU-MU rivalry one-sided as of late, but hope exists for a fierce competition
