I've long been a proponent of sports - and all forms of entertainment, really - making absolutely no sense at all. The more confusing and hilarious a layperson finds a sports concept or story when it's explained to them, the more irresistible I find it.
Maybe that's part of why I've long been drawn to college football, the sport that historically makes the least sense.
As some pundits like to put it, no one is in charge. There is no one whose job it is to, in theory at least, look out for the best interests of the sport. Instead, it's run - and I should use quote marks around that word - by either conference commissioners, television executives, anonymous rich donors, or some other shadowy cabal, depending on the day.
The state of the sport now is pretty lousy, in my opinion - conference and television greed running rampant, arguments over how big a tournament bracket is necessary (or most lucrative), schedules increasingly getting less competitive as schools value gaudy records over fun matchups, unchecked player and coach movement making it impossible for a casual fan to follow the sport year to year, et al. - but I'm not here to beat that drum. Plenty of other old curmudgeons like me have already written that story better than I can. No, what I'm here to talk about are rivalry trophies - the more absurd the backstory, the better.
We have rivalry trophies around here, of course - the Blood, Sweat and Tears Jug between Hart and Shelby, the Bell and the Bridge trophies between Whitehall and Montague. But college football has some of the best - and weirdest - rivalry trophies. I went and hunted for some of the silliest and wildest backstories surrounding these trophies. Win a bar bet with some of these stories - or just do what I do and rattle a couple of them off to an incredulous spouse, friend or family member who will then question, even more than before, what the heck you're doing wasting your time with this stuff on fall Saturdays.
The Little Brown Jug, Michigan vs. Minnesota - This one came up in our office recently and inspired this column. It's one of the coolest rivalry trophies there is - it might be the oldest - and it certainly owns one of the most ludicrous backstories.
According to Michigan's student newspaper, the Michigan Daily, the Jug was born back in 1903, when the Wolverines were heading north to take on Minnesota in a much-anticipated late season battle. Both teams were undefeated, but the Wolverines, under Fielding Yost, were considered the favorites, having not given up a single point to date.
Especially in those days, coaches were crazy people, and Yost got it into his head that Minnesota fans might intentionally contaminate his team's water supply, so he ordered a student manager to go purchase a five-gallon jug of water for UM to use during the game. You can see where this is going.
As it turned out, Minnesota scored a late touchdown and the game ended in a 6-6 tie, setting off a crazy celebration among the home fans. In the rush to get out of there, Michigan left the jug behind - and Minnesota celebrated the 'capture' of the jug by painting it brown and placing the final score on it, with the Gophers' 6 deliberately larger than UM's. The story goes that when Michigan requested the return of the jug, Minnesota instead challenged the Wolverines to win it from them, and a tradition was born.
The Iron Skillet, SMU vs. TCU - Like many great college football stories, the origin of this trophy, played between two neighboring schools in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, is disputed. According to SMU's athletic website, one story goes that a Mustang fan was grilling up frog legs in a skillet during a tailgate prior to a 1940s game against the Horned Frogs (get it?). A TCU fan, perhaps both offended and impressed, suggested the winning team get both the cooking utensil and the dish itself.
A less organic but equally silly version of the story is that the two schools' student governments came together to devise the trophy as a way to curb the increasing vandalism going on between the two sides after games. The skillet ended up getting lost at some point, but a new version of the trophy was created in 1993 and has been passed back and forth since. Unfortunately, this, like so many rivalries, has been nuked by outside forces, as the schools have decided the risk of a loss harming their playoff chances is too great to continue playing the game.
The Civil ConFLiCT trophy, UConn vs. UCF - So many rivalry stories are irresistible because the fans and schools care too much. This is the rare one that is irresistible because one side didn't care at all.
UCF joined the American Athletic Conference, of which UConn was already a member, in 2013, and a year later, Bob Diaco was hired as the Huskies' head coach. Late in 2014, Diaco earned his first conference victory as head coach in a game against the Knights, and for some reason determined that meant UCF was his team's blood rival. He dubbed it the Civil ConFLiCT, stylized with the postal abbreviations of each team's home state.
UCF coach George O'Leary was quite clear the Knights weren't into this - the schools are, after all, nowhere near one another and have no historical connection - but Diaco was undeterred, telling ABC News that UCF didn't get to determine whether they were the Huskies' rival. He had a trophy made for his Huskies and they celebrated winning it again during the 2015 season. The following year, according to NBC Sports, UCF, now coached by Scott Frost, requested UConn not bother with the trophy; the Huskies ignored him. After UCF won that game, they left the field without acknowledging the trophy, which simply sat on a bench in the stadium until it was eventually removed. Diaco was fired after the season, and with him went any vestige of caring about this series.
The Athletic later reported that a UCF fan retrieved the trophy, repaired its water damage and gave it to UCF, which still has it. However, no one knows for sure if it's the real trophy or an impostor.
The teams haven't played since 2021. UConn left the American to be independent, and UCF is now in the Big 12, so they probably won't see each other again soon. Somehow I doubt either party really cares; UConn women's hoops coach Geno Auriemma told Barstool at one point that the whole saga "might have been the dumbest thing in the history of sports."
Floyd of Rosedale, Minnesota vs. Iowa - I don't mean to single out Minnesota again, but come on. It's a pig!
OK, here's what happened; according to the Gophers' athletic site, in 1935 the two sides were engaging in a bit of a war of words regarding star Hawkeye Ozzie Simmons and late hits Iowa alleged he took in the teams' game the year prior. (The downer part of the story - Simmons was one of very few black players in major college football at the time, so he had reason to believe what might have motivated the hits.)
The governor of Iowa, Clyde Herring, implied to reporters at one point that Hawkeye supporters might storm onto the field if those tactics extended into their next game, which some in Minnesota perceived as a threat; Minnesota's Attorney General even accused Herring of inciting a riot. In what can only be called an ingenious move to lighten the mood, Minnesota's governor, Floyd Olson, then wrote Herring to kiddingly congratulate him on firing up both sides for the coming matchup and bet a "prize hog" from each state on the outcome of the game.
The gambit worked to perfection - reports of the time said the game, a 13-6 Minnesota win, went off without incident, with Simmons and the Gophers going out of their respective ways to make peace. Rosedale Farms in Iowa fulfilled the bet by giving Minnesota's team a 200-pound pig, named Floyd after the Minnesota governor.
The pig died before the following year's game, but the Cedar Rapids Gazette reported that a one-third size likeness of the pig would be created as a rivalry trophy, and it's been played for ever since.
Stanford Axe, California vs. Stanford - By itself, an axe as a rivalry trophy isn't special. They exist elsewhere, most notably with Minnesota (them again!) and Wisconsin. However, the craziness that has long surrounded this axe makes it notable.
According to California Golden Blogs, the Axe first showed up in April 1899 during a baseball game between the schools at Stanford. Stanford taunted Cal faithful early in the game, using it to chop up blue and gold ribbons as the Cardinal took a big early lead. Cal later came back to win, and in the mayhem, Cal students stole the Axe and raced towards Berkeley with it, resulting in a lengthy chase through San Francisco in which its handle broke off but the Axe made it to its new home.
Two days later, Stanford students stormed the Cal campus looking for the Axe, but it was well hidden and could not be found. Cal held the Axe for 31 years afterwards, keeping it in a Berkeley bank vault and bringing it out only for one annual rally on the anniversary of its liberation from Stanford.
It was that rally, in 1930, that, according to The Stanford Daily, saw a remarkable scheme carried out by a group now known as the "Immortal" or "Immoral 21" depending on which side you're on. Posing as celebrants during the rally, the group blinded the Axe's guard with camera flashes, wrestled it away from a Cal student, threw tear gas bombs as a distraction and then posed as search party organizers to send Cal backers "in all directions but the right one." The Axe was transported to Stanford and stayed in a Palo Alto bank vault for three years until cooler heads prevailed and it was decided the Axe should be a rivalry trophy. Well, mostly cooler heads; it's been stolen a few different times since then, too, but not since the 1970s.
The annual Axe ceremony after the teams play in football is something to behold. Known as The Stare Down, it involves student committees from each side meeting on a sideline near midfield late in the game and glaring at one another until the game ends and it's determined which side gets to take it home.
A new wrinkle was added to the story of the Axe after the legendary 1982 game, which ended with the Golden Bears, with the help of several laterals, returning a kickoff for a game-winning touchdown with no time on the clock while the oblivious Stanford band marched onto the field during play. (This is now known in college football lore as simply The Play.) Cal won the game 25-20 - unless Stanford has the Axe, in which case the score is always changed to 20-19.
There are so many more wild and crazy rivalry stories in this gloriously stupid sport, and maybe at some point I'll dig up some more - but these are just a few of my favorites.
