This Weekend In College Football

Syracuse will play West Virginia for the Ben Schwartzwalder Trophy:

Photo: Cuse Connection

Illinois and Purdue will play for the Purdue Cannon:




Photo: Purdue

 Notre Dame and USC will play for the Jeweled Shillelagh.  Notre Dame loves playing for shillelaghs:

Finally, for a trophy a surveyor could love, but would argue with other surveyors about, North Dakota State and South Dakota State will play for the Dakota Marker:

  The Dakota Marker is a model replica of the quartzite monuments that were used to decipher the border between North and South Dakota when Dakota Territory was split into 2 states along the Seventh Standard Parallel. On June 4th, 1891, Charles Bates signed a contract and used quartzite monuments made in Sioux Falls to mark the boundary. Each monument stood seven feet tall and ten inches square at the top and were placed at half-mile intervals. The monuments were inscribed with the initials "N.D." on the north side and "S.D." on the south side. It took the Yankton, South Dakota man the summers of 1891 and 1892 to install the 720 monuments and finish the Dakota border marker project.
The trophy itself was the brainchild of Adam Jones, then President of the NDSU Chapter of Blue Key National Honor Society.
The trophy was unveiled to the public on April 21, 2004 at a ceremony just outside Hankinson, North Dakota, a small community that lies adjacent to the North Dakota/South Dakota border.
The trophy is sponsored by the NDSU chapter of Blue Key National Honor Society and the SDSU Student Association.
The Dakota Marker's inscription includes the following: N.D. to represent North Dakota, S.D. to represent South Dakota, and 190 M to represent the distance in miles between Fargo, ND and Brookings, SD.

I think some surveyors ought to dress up in period attire and use old surveying equipment to set a monument exactly in the middle of the field prior to the game.  Of course, the surveyors will be too busy getting drunk, just like the old-timers.