  In this paper we discuss a quantity that can be derived from the hadronic
spectrum - the ratio between the color hyperfine splitting of a K meson and
that of a Sigma baryon. It will be shown that within the constituent quark
model this ratio depends only on the ratio of contact probabilities within the
hadrons. We compute this ratio assuming several phenomenological potential
models, and show that the best agreement with data is obtained from the Cornell
potential - Coulomb + linear. Thus the analysis of color hyperfine interactions
corroborat es the preference for the Cornell potential based on quarkonium
spectra.
