Cleaning out the Inbox: Football Rivalry Edition

     The end of the college football season usually brings rivalry games and The Athletic took a week-long look at some of the rivalry stories that make the game so great.

We begin with the Slab of Bacon, a trophy fought for between Wisconsin and Minnesota from 1930 and 1942 but disappeared in 1943 before being found in a Wisconsin storage closet in 1994.

The odd thing about the disappearance was that when the slab was found, the scores on the trophy had been filled in up to the 1970 season.

To this day, no one knows how the trophy disappeared in 1943, who filled in the scores in 1970, or how the trophy wound up in the storage closet in the Wisconsin Sports Information Department.

This article covers the Iowa Hawkeyes' various football rivalries (and the Hawkeyes certainly seem to lead the nation in legitimate rivalries) with one Iowa memory or note for each school in their wheelhouse.

For my money, the Floyd of Rosedale trophy between Iowa and Minnesota is the best in the game with the Paul Bunyan's Axe between Wisconsin and Minnesota a close second.

One rivalry that is especially fierce but doesn't always come up as one of the more bitter battles is between Arizona and Arizona State, which will be taking its rivalry to its fourth conference next year when both schools join the Big 12.

The battle for the Territorial Cup started in 1899 between the Wildcats and Sun Devils but had been missing from 1970 until being found in a church vault in 1983.

The Cup still didn't become the official trophy until 2001 and even today, the actual cup is delivered quietly to the winning trophy a few days after the game.

A same-size replica is awarded to the winning team for the post-game celebrations.

You don't really think of Houston and Central Florida as rivals but the deeper that you dig into the common history of the space program, Houston and Orlando (the home of UCF) have been rivals for a long time.

This ESPN article goes over the facts and history of NASA and how it could eventually be part of a rivalry between the two Big 12 schools.

After reading this article, the potential for a rivalry seems strong as it seems that the space folks have some legitimate disdain for the other from each side.

And it wouldn't be a TRS post on trophies without mentioning the Civil Conflict trophy, the much-derided rivalry idea of former UConn head coach Bob Diaco for the Huskies and Central Florida, which the Knights had literally no interest in fighting over.

The trophy that UCF abandoned on the field after a 2016 win in the rain, has rarely been seen again but there is what some claim to be the trophy but it has some differences in font and wood, which has been attributed to the rain damage needing to be repaired from the 2016 "Conflict".

The article tells the story of how the trophy was acquired and kept by UCF, the school that wanted nothing to do with the trophy and rivalry in the first place!