The word rivalry is thrown around a bit too liberally if you ask me. 50 years ago, Middle's rivals were Western Kentucky, Tennessee Tech, Murray State...

As a matter of fact, excluding Western, the only CUSA teams we've played more than seven times, are FIU(13), FAU(15) and UNT(15).

Compare that to Tennessee Tech(75), Murray State(70), WKU(67), Austin Peay(53), EKU(48), Morehead St(46), Tennessee-Chattanooga(37), ETSU(36).

If we kept this current CUSA alignment for 30 more years, five of our six most played opponents would still be these former rivals now in FCS or no longer playing football. At that point FAU would be seventh at 45 games.

This is not to say that I wish we still had those rivals, in the last twenty years we've played Tennessee Tech and Austin Peay once each.

But hell, a little over a decade ago(while WKU was still FCS), our "biggest rival" was North Texas and then Troy, both of which are mostly afterthoughts at this point. I couldn't care less if we ever play Troy again and short of meeting in a CCG several times in a short period, there's little reason to believe we'll ever see the UNT "rivalry" liven back up.

Our rival is Western Kentucky. FAU is developing into a bit of a football specific rival, but that's more to do with them being the one constant through realignment, we've played 15 consecutive seasons, but their 4-11 record and recently snapping a nine year losing streak has done little to make it about anything more than the happenstance of moving from the SBC to CUSA in the same season.

Rivalries do not develop over the course of an average CFB player's career of 3-5 years, not even a decade like Brandon Doughty's time at Western is really enough time to develop a rivalry.