Missouri Southern State vs. Pittsburg State

Carnie Smith Stadium

Carnie Smith Stadium rises from the west edge of Pittsburg like a monument to small-town determination. It isn’t the biggest arena in Kansas, but few carry a story as deep. The red and gold seats overlook a field that has seen more than a century of triumphs, heartbreaks, and homecoming parades. On crisp autumn days, when the band’s first notes echo off the stands, you can feel the history press close — a blend of old leather helmets, marching cadence, and community pride.

Pittsburg State’s football tradition began in 1908, just a few years after the university itself opened. At the time, it was known as the Kansas State Manual Training Normal School, and football was less spectacle than test of will — played on rough fields with handmade gear. Through the decades, the Gorillas grew from a teachers’ college team into one of the most respected programs in small-college football.

Their home stadium was built in 1923 and originally called Brandenburg Stadium, named for President William Aaron Brandenburg, who championed athletics as an extension of education and character. In 1987, it was renamed Carnie Smith Stadium in honor of one of the university’s most beloved coaches. Smith led the Gorillas from 1949 to 1966, posting an extraordinary record and instilling a tradition of discipline and grit that still defines the program. Under his leadership, Pittsburg State won two NAIA National Championships (1957 and 1961) and became known across the region for hard-nosed, blue-collar football that mirrored the spirit of the town itself.

The stadium has grown with the program. Major renovations in the 2000s modernized the facility, adding the Robert W. Plaster Center, Brown Pavilion, and expanded seating — pushing capacity to more than 11,000. The press box glints in the Kansas sun, and from its top row you can see the outline of Pittsburg’s old smokestacks in the distance — reminders of the industrial past that forged both the city and its team.

Pittsburg State reached the height of its national fame under Coach Chuck Broyles, who led the Gorillas from 1990 to 2009. Broyles’ teams became legends in NCAA Division II, claiming the 1991 National Championship and making multiple title-game appearances throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. During those years, PSU was a powerhouse — often leading the nation in attendance and producing professional-caliber athletes despite its small-school status.

Among its notable alumni are:

Dennis Franchione, former head coach at Texas A&M, TCU, and Alabama, who began his coaching career at PSU.

Brian Moorman, NFL punter and two-time Pro Bowler with the Buffalo Bills, known for his athleticism and charitable work.

John Brown, a record-setting wide receiver who carried his speed from Pittsburg State to the NFL, playing for teams including the Arizona Cardinals and Buffalo Bills.

Carnie Smith himself, whose name still stands over the stadium entrance — a testament to a coach who built more than a team; he built a legacy.

The Gorillas’ mascot — unique among all of college sports — captures their essence: fierce, focused, impossible to ignore. On game days, the stadium becomes a meeting ground for alumni, miners’ grandchildren, and new students alike. The red and gold banners flutter against the bleachers, and the chants of “Go Rillas!” ripple out toward the prairie.

For all its trophies and national titles, what endures most is the connection between the school and the community. Pittsburg doesn’t just host its team — it lives through it. The Gorillas are as much a civic identity as an athletic one, linking a century of students, educators, and families in one ongoing tradition of pride and perseverance.

Carnie Smith Stadium stands not merely as a venue, but as a chronicle — brick by brick, season by season — of what happens when a small Kansas town believes in itself.

Pittsburg State University

The day is bright but brisk — the kind of clear, hard sunshine that belongs to late autumn in the Four States. The air has a crisp edge, not enough to bite, but enough to make you tug the hoodie strings just a little tighter. The sky is a polished blue dome over Pittsburg, Kansas, and the leaves, half-fallen, skip along the brick walks in small, erratic dances.

We parked near the edge of campus, where the warehouses and workshops hint at the city’s industrial ancestry. The walk to the stadium took us through the heart of Pittsburg State University — red-brick buildings glowing in the sunlight, students and alumni converging in small clusters, the distant thump of a drumline keeping time with the day. It’s a beautiful campus in its own unpretentious way — not manicured to perfection but lived in, practical, purposeful. The kind of place that has always measured success not in prestige but in perseverance.

That has been its story from the beginning. PSU started life in 1903 as the Manual Training Auxiliary School of the State Normal School of Emporia — a mouthful of a name for a modest vision: to train teachers who could teach both mind and hand. Pittsburg was a fitting cradle for such a school. It was a town built by coal miners and machinists, by immigrants who spoke more languages than they could count but shared a belief in work as dignity. When the school became independent in 1908, it grew into the Kansas State Manual Training Normal School, teaching future educators how to weld, sew, carve, and think.

The decades reshaped it but never erased its purpose. By the 1920s, it was the Kansas State Teachers College of Pittsburg, a hub for rural education in an era when most Kansas towns were still teaching in one-room schoolhouses. After the war years, new buildings rose, the curriculum widened, and by 1977, it earned its final name — Pittsburg State University. The Kansas Technology Center, opened in the 1990s, stands today as a sleek reminder of those early manual training roots: innovation by way of craftsmanship.

We wandered past it, the metallic scent of machines faint in the air, and crossed toward Porter Hall, where art students were lugging portfolios across the lawn. Somewhere not far from here, decades ago, my mom carried her own stack of coursework — she earned her Master’s in Education from this place, after finishing her Bachelor’s at Missouri Southern. Today she’s here again, standing between her two schools, wearing both loyalties with pride.

And that’s the heart of it: our family is split perfectly between Gorilla red and Lion green. My brother and I both MSSU graduates, my mom a hybrid of both, our roots tangled across the border between Joplin and Pittsburg.

The Miners Bowl is the annual expression of that shared contradiction — a rivalry between equals, close enough that you can hear the opposing band warming up before you’ve left the parking lot. It began in 1968, named for the mining heritage that ties these towns together more tightly than any scoreboard ever could. Joplin and Pittsburg were built on coal seams and classroom dreams — their universities rising from the same soil that once fed furnaces and smelters.

By the time we reached Carnie Smith Stadium, the band was in full swing. The brass shone under the sun, the drums rolled like thunder, and the crowd — half red, half green — hummed with that electric, good-natured rivalry that feels more like family teasing than combat. You could see it in the mingled colors of the hoodies, in the easy banter of old friends on opposite sides of the bleachers. The air itself seemed divided — part barbecue smoke, part concession popcorn, all nostalgia.

I looked at my mom as she took it in — the banners, the music, the energy — and thought of all the ways these schools had shaped her, and through her, us. The education degrees she earned here and in Joplin weren’t just credentials; they were continuation — proof that a family from small-town Missouri could build and keep building, each generation climbing another rung.

When the whistle blew and the first kickoff arced high against the sun, the crowd’s roar rose into that cold blue sky — a sound born from shared history and local pride. The Lions and Gorillas might clash on the field, but their roots run side by side beneath it.

It’s a sunny day with a chill in the air. The kind of day that reminds you how rivalry can also be gratitude — how two towns, two schools, and one family can all be part of the same enduring story.

Happy Caturday

Cupo Fuoco II (2016)

Today is All Saints Day. It is a day in the Christian calendar set aside to remember those who have gone before. Though I no longer hold to the metaphysics of heaven or canonization, I find in this day a ritual value that persists beyond belief. It is a day of memory, a day of names. A day that reminds us that our lives are layered atop the ashes and labors of others.

When I look at Roberto Ferri’s Cupo Fuoco II, I see the visual language of this same remembrance. The woman, crowned in roses, gazes past the skull she cradles not in fear, but in recognition. She holds death as one might hold a relic. Her flesh glows with the heat of life, while the skull, brittle and colorless, bears a single flower pressed between its teeth. It is the most eloquent of all symbols: beauty and decay sharing the same breath.

The Latin phrase memento mori — remember that you must die — has haunted Christian art for centuries. But I do not take it as morbid instruction. Rather, I see it as an ethical and aesthetic principle: to remember that one’s time is finite is to sharpen the value of every living moment. In Ferri’s chiaroscuro world, that knowledge is rendered in light itself. Death exists not in opposition to life, but as its boundary and therefore its form. Without the skull, her tenderness has no context; without the darkness, there is no illumination.

All Saints Day, viewed through this lens, becomes a communal memento mori. It gathers the memory of all those who lived and died and insists that we are part of that same continuum. The saints, stripped of their supernatural trappings, become human exemplars. They become those who wrestled, erred, loved, and died. In the Book of Wisdom it is written, “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them.” I read that now as poetry, not doctrine: a metaphor for the endurance of influence, the way a life well-lived continues to shape others even after the body is gone.

Ferri’s painting belongs to a long lineage of sacred and symbolic imagery. It echoes the penitential portraits of Mary Magdalene, who so often sat beside a skull in contemplation, the emblem of her repentance and her recognition of mortality. In those Baroque canvases by Caravaggio, de la Tour, and Ribera, the Magdalene’s sensual beauty coexisted with her spiritual awakening. Ferri reinterprets that tradition for a secular age: his subject is not penitent but aware. The roses adorning her headscarf recall the crowns of the saints, yet they are fresh, fragrant, mortal. Even the skull evokes not despair but dialogue. She is not renouncing the world; she is comprehending it.

In this way Cupo Fuoco II extends the vanitas tradition, those 17th-century still lifes that paired blossoms with skulls, gold with decay. Their purpose was to remind the viewer that all things pass. Yet Ferri’s modern sensibility introduces tenderness where once there was warning. The memento mori becomes not a threat but an invitation to live fully, knowing the cost.

On a day like this, I think of those who shaped me: family, friends, teachers, artists long dead whose works still stir me. Their absence is not an emptiness but a contour, like the negative space that gives a painting depth. I honor them not with prayer, but with attention. To remember them is to participate in the long human project of meaning-making, the same project that produced both the saints and the artists who painted them.

As Ferri reminds me, the task is not to flee the skull, but to hold it tenderly, to understand that within its hollow sockets once burned the same dark fire that now burns in me. And when mine, too, is extinguished, perhaps something of that light will remain in the minds I’ve touched, the works I’ve made, or simply in the continuing bloom of life that grows, impossibly, out of death.

“It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting,

for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart.”

— Ecclesiastes 7:2