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College football is chock-full of tradition, some of it very old, some of it new and much of it booze-fueled and silly. Now that the top NCAA football programs have begun to seal their fates for the season by either losing 56-10 twice or failing to win 56-10 twice during the first two weeks, let’s take a look at some of these traditions.
Live Mascots
Some teams use live animal mascots to get their fans riled up, and in an era when Hollywood can’t make a single film with a trained dancing bear without drawing the ire of PETA, it’s somewhat heartening to see so many major colleges thumbing their noses at the animal rights organization. It’s easy to have a coonhound as a mascot, like Tennessee’s Smokey, or a bulldog, like Georgia’s UGA (UGA VII died of a heart attack—obviously non-tailgate-food-related—in November 2009, and UGA VIII will be announced by October 19) or Yale’s Handsome Dan (never expect to see UGA and Yale mentioned in the same breath again, athletically or otherwise). But try teaching a buffalo how to cheer. Colorado can barely keep its buffalo, Ralphie, from making opposing players look like rodeo clowns. Ralphie IV and Ralphie V currently share duties; like the Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen of the 1980s and early ’90s. Ralphie IV is used when a calm buffalo is needed off the field, and Ralphie V is used when a crazed buffalo is required. LSU manages to be somewhat more safety conscious. Its Bengal tiger, Mike (they are currently on Mike VI, who is a Bengal mix) spends his time in either a zoo-like habitat next to Tiger Stadium or being driven around the field in a cage that is usually draped in dainty and relatively meatless cheerleader legs. Baylor uses trained bears, who live in a habitat on campus and no doubt love the summers in Waco. Don’t worry, Baylor stopped feeding them Dr. Pepper in the mid ’90s.
UGA VII
Trophies
Is it possible to have a college football rivalry without a trophy for the rivals to pass back and forth? Some SEC and Big 10 schools seem to play for a trophy every other weekend. Everyone wants to present Notre Dame with something Irish. Notre Dame and Purdue play for The Shillelagh Trophy (a Shillelagh is a sort of Gaelic war club), while USC and Notre Dame play for the Jeweled Shillelagh and Notre Dame and Boston College play for the Ireland Trophy as well as the Frank Leahy Memorial Bowl. Notre Dame also plays Michigan State for the Megaphone Trophy and Stanford for The Legends Trophy. There are a number of trophy-shaped trophies, a few victory bells, several governor’s cups, and Minnesota and Penn State play for the Governor’s Victory Bell. There are boring trophies, such as the Baird Brothers Trophy, which is a chain of brass fish that has been passed between Case Western Reserve and the College of Wooster since 1984, when the Baird brothers, economics professors at the two schools, thought it would be a good idea for the schools to have a football trophy. There are tasty-looking trophies—University of Alabama at Birmingham and Memphis play for a metal slab of ribs, and fittingly, the barbecue competition that accompanies the game can sometimes be more exciting than the football. There are trophies that would otherwise seem geographically insensitive—Appalachian State and Western Carolina play for a big moonshine jug. Jugs make popular trophies in college football. Ithaca and SUNY Cortland play for the Cortaca Jug, which, from its inception in 1959 and into the 1980s, was a jug purchased for $2 at a yard sale, and Minnesota and Michigan play for the Little Brown Jug. Similarly, Idaho and Montana play for the Little Brown Stein.
Boots are also popular. The Division 1 schools in Utah play for a 100 year-old boot and Colorado State and the Wyoming play for The Bronze Boot. Paul Bunyan is really popular. Michigan State and Michigan play for the Paul Bunyan Trophy, while Minnesota and Wisconsin play for Paul Bunyan’s Axe, which is less legendary than the Stanford Axe, which passes between Stanford and Cal. That axe debuted in 1899, when Stanford fans used it in a cheer that involved a mock execution. Cal students soon stole it, triggering a chase through the streets of San Francisco. There are other trophies that have histories, such as Iowa and Minnesota’s Floyd of Rosedale, a statue of a hog. That trophy has a history that involves racism, federal indictments for gambling violations, threatened lynchings and a pig given as first prize in a children’s essay contest. There are trophies that no one should want, such as the pair of Dutch clogs that Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Union College play for, or the Hickory Stick, which is a stick of wood that Northwest Missouri State and Truman State battle over, and Oregon and Oregon State actually have a trophy that neither wants—a shoddily made wooden platypus goes to the loser. And then there are even bureaucratically affected trophies. The U.S. Coast Guard Academy and the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy play for the Secretaries Cup, which was the Secretary’s Cup until 2003, when the Coast Guard became part of the Department of Homeland Security and both academies were no longer under the umbrella of the Secretary of Transportation.
Jeweled Shillelagh
Songs
While long-held traditions related to fight songs and marching bands exist, there are also recently created musical traditions that fall under the category of semi-embarrassing. At the end of the third quarter, Wisconsin fans go nuts for House of Pain’s “Jump Around,” and Virginia Tech always takes the field to Metalica’s “Enter Sandman,” which seems a little more Trevor Hoffman than Knute Rockne.
Booze-Fueled
And, of course there are the purely drunken traditions. Ohio State students jump in freezing and probably dirty Mirror Lake on the Thursday before they play Michigan (this year they will have to do it on Thanksgiving or find another day). Texas A & M has a world record–sized bonfire every year before they play Texas. In 1999, 12 people died while the wood was still being stacked, and today the bonfire is not sanctioned by the school. And Virginia has already spent decades trying to stop its students from participating in the “Fourth Year Fifth,” during which each senior tries to drink a bottle of liquor on the Saturday morning before kickoff of the last home game of the season, to, as one person wrote, “celebrate four years of sub-par football.”
—David Dames