Sports rivalries don’t exist in a vacuum. You can say this or that rivalry is the biggest before the season starts, but once the games are played things have a tendency to change. Inevitably, some rivalries that are great on paper won’t live up to the hype; others, meanwhile, will come out of nowhere and just burst into flames before our very eyes.
This is most definitely true in college basketball. While the rivalries really don’t change that much from year to year—and generally, it’s their endurance that makes these rivalries special—you never know when passions will boil up and one great rivalry will eclipse all the others.
Now that the college basketball season has really kicked into high gear, it’s a good time to step back and have a look at the state of the game’s biggest rivalries. Thus, today we present you the 9 Biggest College Basketball Rivalries of 2012.
Obviously, there are so many great rivalries that they can’t all make this list. But hey, we do our best. So without any further ado…