Don't Miss the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl

One of the more ridiculous college football bowl games kicks off at 3:30 PM EST today.  At least it doesn't take itself too seriously:

Playing For A Spitter

Michigan State and Indiana are battling for The Old Brass Spittoon:

In 1950 MSU football had just come off a 36-33 emotional victory over Notre Dame and were looking to avoid a letdown against Indiana the following week. Knowing this, junior class president Gene McDermott wanted to play his part in keeping the Spartans from falling trap to Indiana.
McDermott and class secretary Virginia O’Brien hit the town to find something that would rile up not only the football team but the student body heading into the Indiana matchup. Inspired by the Little Brown Jug, which University of Michigan and Minnesota play for, the two wandered into an antique shop in Lansing.
McDermott spotted the spittoon and thought it would be perfect for the rivalry. Inside the spittoon was a note that said the spittoon was in use during the 1800s at a trading post around what is now East Lansing. As the story goes, residents of both Michigan and Indiana would pass by the trading post and use the spittoon while hunting and fishing in Michigan, therefore becoming the basis for the reasoning behind the Old Brass Spittoon. The spittoon was cleaned up, and bought for $25 by McDermott.
However, for it to become a rivalry trophy, Indiana had to first accept the challenge of playing for it. McDermott sent a telegram to the Indiana Student Senate telling them about the new found trophy. Their reply?
“We the students of Indiana University hereby accept your challenge.”
The challenge had begun and the Old Brass Spittoon was born. Engraved on the outside of the spittoon are the words:

“ ‘The Old Brass Spittoon’ ”

Inaugurated by the students of

Michigan State College and Indiana University

November - 4 - 1950

Since then, Michigan State has kicked Indiana's ass to the tune of a 44-15-2 record.

Early November Weekend Links

Some interesting-looking stories for your weekend perusal:

Black Hills Brawl: The longest running rivalry you've never heard of - SB Nation.  Black Hills State and South Dakota School of Mines playing for the Homestake Trophy:

The Sea of Crises - Grantland. Sumo wrestling and a failed coup, among other things.

Adding Lightness: One way or another, Ford's new aluminum truck is a game changer - The Economist

The last farmer: At 94, one rural Missouri farmer continues to till his land - Washington Post

Impact of Earned Income Tax Credit on Rural People - Center for Rural Affairs.

The EITC has become a major source of income support for low-income rural taxpayers, particularly in the South. Greater non-metropolitan area usage of the EITC follows general economic trends in the nation, including:

• Concentration of poverty in many rural locations across the nation.
• Rural per capita income that is 78% of urban per capita income (2012).
• Rural earnings per job that is 71% of urban earnings per job (2012).
• Rural poverty rate that is nearly 19% higher than the urban poverty rate (2012).

The EITC has become a “rural program,” or at least a non-urban program. It is important to rural people and their well-being. It is also important to the economies of rural communities.

Meet the Queen Bees Building Buzz for the Honey Industry - Modern Farmer.  Mouthpieces for Big Honey.  The picture of the girl wearing the tiara and bee beard is awesome.

Chicken of tomorrow - Aeon.  A history of the rise of Big Poultry.

Fascinating Photos of NASA's Abandoned Launch Sites - Wired

Collapse: The Oro Mudslide and the Community That Survived It - Seattle Met

The Green Monster: How the Border Patrol became America's most out-of-control law enforcement agency - Politico.  Considering the LAPD, NYPD and Ferguson PD are competition, the Border Patrol has to be pretty wild.

Four Ways to Innovate Through Analogies - Wall Street Journal.  An obvious analogy that helps me understand things better are the analogies between electricity and water/air.  For example, the greater the current/flow, the greater the resistance, while the larger the wire/pipe the lesser the resistance. Voltage to head pressure, etc.

Tony Robbins, CEO Whisperer - Fortune.  From infomercial pitchman to multimillionaire to power-brokers.  Hey, everybody is susceptible to sales pitches.

Life in the unemployment capital of America - Vox.  Yuma, Arizona.  See also, The hidden truth about job growth, lost amidst the statistical noise and optimists' hopes - Fabius Maximus

How the U.S. Government Tested Biological Warfare on America - Priceonomics

How Boy Bits First Came To Be - All Things Considered.  The evolution of penises.

The two things you need to know about the Supreme Court's new Obamacare case - Vox.  What a legalistic, and totally nihilist case to try to fuck over poor people.  The refusal to set up state exchanges, expand Medicaid and fix these little mistakes in the law show how un-Christian the self-proclaimed Christian Republicans like Jim Jordan and Tim Huelskamp really are.  If there is a Hell, there is a special place in it for these hypocrites.

In Heart of Eagle Ford, Karnes City Peers Beyond Boom - Texas Tribune  See also Shale Drillers Idle Rigs From Texas To Utah Amid Oil Rout - Bloomberg.  The Bloomberg article is kind of a mixed bag, but I also think that the price drop won't last an extremely long time.   Three to twelve months, maybe.

Five Reasons Why Texas Won't Turn Blue This Year (or Anytime Soon) - Texas Monthly

What are you reading?

A Bronze Stalk Battle

Not that I'm totally up on the Mid-American Conference. but  when it comes to the Bronze Stalk Trophy, a guy has to make a decision.  Because of the whole Dekalb seed corn tie-in, plus my hatred of all things Indiana, I'll be rooting for Northern Illinois.  Come on Huskies, win this:

You gotta love that motivation.

Pelvic Thrust Paul?

I was just watching the end of the Michigan-Michigan State game, and they showed the Michigan State players carrying the Paul Bunyan Trophy.  I hadn't noticed it before, but it looks like ol' Paul is giving a pelvic thrust:

Weird.

LeBlanc Wins Hobey Baker Award

USCHO:

Drew LeBlanc didn’t reach the national championship game with St. Cloud State, but he picked up one piece of hardware from his trip.
LeBlanc was named the 2013 Hobey Baker Award winner on Friday at Consol Energy Center, one day after the Huskies lost to Quinnipiac in the Frozen Four semifinals.Tenth nationally in points per game and the national leader with 37 assists, LeBlanc returned from a compound left leg fracture last season to captain St. Cloud State to its first Frozen Four appearance.
With 13 goals, LeBlanc has the lowest goals total of a Hobey-winning forward, a list that includes 25 of the 33 winners.
He beat out fellow Hobey Hat Trick finalists Eric Hartzell of Quinnipiac and Johnny Gaudreau of Boston College, as well as seven other finalists who were on the ballot given to the 23-person selection committee after the NCAA regionals.
Each of the three Hat Trick finalists was the player of the year in his conference, but LeBlanc also was the WCHA’s student-athlete of the year.

I'd have picked that Hartzell kid.  More about the trophy's namesake here.  Quinnipiac and Yale meet in the NCAA championship game on Saturday night.

The Making of the Lombardi Trophy

A little information about how it's made:

The silver itself has a street value of about $3,500. But, if you add in the high-end labor to make it (there is NO glue!) and its symbolism, the value is a little more difficult to assess.
"I would tell you that they trophy itself is priceless," O'Rourke said. "Whatever monetary value is assigned to the trophy doesn't accurately present the work the athletes have put into it."
The NFL is a customer and does pay for the trophy.
Sources tell CNBC that the Tiffany trophy business, which includes everything from Major League Baseball to PGA golf, is modestly profitable but probably with smaller margins that the rest of its jewelry business.
The NFL trophy is made in a workshop nestled into a distribution center in Parsippany, New Jersey.
"It's like the turn of the century with some of the machines and equipment used," O'Rourke noted.

You can see the video here.  I'd have embedded the video, but the selfish bastards apparently don't want to share.

Weekend Football Roundup

Notre Dame's defense managed to carry them to the BCS Championship game, while Ohio State's tattoo scandal prevents them from joining the Irish.  If there was ever a year when I'd like to see Notre Dame play the Buckeyes, it is this one.  Instead, they will be meeting the winner of the Alabama-Georgia game.  That won't be nearly as good for the Irish.  Also on the college front, Purdue blew out Indiana for the Old Oaken Bucket, Northwestern beat Illinois for the Land of Lincoln trophy, Tennessee beat Kentucky in the former Beer Barrel game and Alabama crushed Auburn in the Iron Bowl.

In Division III, Mount Union and Widener moved up to meet next week, as did St. Thomas and Hobart, Linfield and Wisconsin-Oshkosh,  and Mary Hardin-Baylor and Wesley.

Up north, Toronto and Calgary meet today in the Grey Cup final at 6:00.  For any of the dozen or so folks in the States who want to watch it, it is supposed to be broadcast live on NBC Sports Network.

In the NFL, I am forced to root for the Browns to beat the Steelers to give the Bengals a chance to creep into the playoffs in spite of their pathetic loss to said team from Cleveland.  I will feel extremely dirty today.

Update:  Browns give up on white flag giveaway: 

The Browns have waved the white flag on their white-flag giveaway for tomorrow's game against the Steelers.
Sponsored by Ticketmaster, the Browns planned to give every fan in attendance an inflatable white flag with the Browns name and an orange helmet on it.
But the symbol of surrender -- especially against the Steelers and their Terrible Towels -- met with great resistance from fans and players.
"After further and careful consideration, we felt it was in the best interests of everyone involved that we not have a giveaway item at tomorrow's game,'' said Browns spokesman Neal Gulkis. "It is something that was intended to be fun for our fans and that they could rally around, and we regret that some didn't perceive it that way. We want to thank all of our fans for their tremendous support and we look forward to seeing them out in force at the stadium tomorrow.”

That is hilarious.

Keg of Nails

Who do you have in the big Cincinnati vs. Louisville grudge match tonight?  I'll take the Bearcats.

Texas State Fair Time

I can tell the state fair is on, because Texas and Oklahoma are battling for the Golden Hat:

So if you are in the area, get your deep-fried jambalaya. Or the deep-fried bacon cinnamon roll. Or the deep-fried chicken and waffles....

College Football Trophies So Far

Last week, Iowa captured Floyd of Rosedale. This week,Michigan State won the Old Brass Spittoon and Miami (OH) and Cincinnati battle for the Victory Bell while Northern Illinois and Ball State play for the Bronze Stalk.

The Malleable History of College Football

Bryan Curtis:

For most of history, A&M has claimed a single national title, in 1939, when German Panzers were rolling into Poland. This year, A&M decided it had won two more national titles, in 1919 and 1927, and added them to a display at Kyle Field. Let's look at the 1927 title. That year, judging by A&M enrollment data, the university had around 2,500 students. All of them were men. Dana X. Bible’s Aggies played a nine-game schedule, which included an impressive five shutouts. One of those shutouts was a 0-0 tie against TCU. When the season ended, various outlets — there was no AP poll yet — gave the national title to Illinois and Notre Dame.
Nearly 60 years later, as Barry Petchesky notes, Jeff Sagarin created a computer formula to rank college football teams. He retroactively declared A&M the 1927 national champs over Illinois et al. So in 1927, Texas A&M won a national title, even though that title wouldn’t exist for almost 60 years and the Aggies wouldn’t brag much about it for 85 years.
It gets stranger. This year, the Aggies also claimed new conference titles, for 1997 and 2010. I was in college in 1997, at Texas, so I can testify about that one. A&M lost the December 6 Big 12 title game to Nebraska, 54-15. Readers of the next day’s Dallas Morning News would discover a headline that read, "Ineffective offense stages A&M’s loss." The Nebraska-A&M game was so uninteresting that it doesn't even rate a Wikipedia page — though that might be the result of UT fans and our co-conspirators in the media.
An A&M spokesman later said the school would add a “South” next to the ’97 and ’10 titles on the display. By this point, the Internet had noticed.

---

Making the past more glorious than it was is one way college football changes history. Another way is to make the past disappear completely. Thanks to Reggie Bush’s NCAA violations, USC did not win 12 games in 2005. I was at the Rose Bowl that year, so I must have been on a Dickian amphetamine binge when Bush lateraled the football to nobody. Also retroactively, Bush did not win the 2005 Heisman. And USC's athletic department has — forgive the Bidenism — literally painted Bush out of the program's history.

He doesn't even touch on the lunacy with vacating all of Penn State's results from 1998 because that is when people at the school found out an assistant coach was raping little boys.  Or stripping Ohio State of a season's wins because Jim Tressel tried to cover up that his players were getting free tattoos.  Anyway, we may as well ignore all college sports records, because most of the good teams will have their wins vacated anyway.

The Cy-Hawk Trophy

Tomorrow at 3:30, Iowa and Iowa State will battle for maybe the most frequently redesigned trophy amongst all of the storied college football rivalry trophies, the Cy-Hawk Trophy. In the past, the trophy was kind of boring:

But last year, the Iowa Corn Growers unveiled one of the greatest bits of corporate propaganda ever:

"I think they can do better," Gov. Terry Branstad chuckled Monday when asked about the trophy. "I'm sure they're going to take another look at that."
Critics seem to find the trophy of a farm family around a bushel of corn and a corn stalk a little bit, well, corny. Since its unveiling Friday at the Iowa State Fair, the trophy has been widely panned and compared to a garage sale leftover or a fireplace mantel centerpiece.
Newspaper and television websites have been filled with people unhappy about the new trophy, which was sponsored by the Iowa Corn Growers Association. Former coach and Hawkeyes legend Hayden Fry said the trophy is "nice-looking," but it doesn't relate to football.
"The farmer, family and corn is all wonderful, but I don't really get the relationship to a football game," he told The Des Moines Register.
Others were less diplomatic.
"Gosh, you don't suppose it's advertising?" asked Bob Uetz, an Ames High School teacher who helped renew the football series in 1977. "That thing is awful, my God."
Mike Ellis, who makes trophies for American Awards in Des Moines, said the new Cy-Hawk trophy was "a little weird for a sports trophy."
"Seems like something you'd see at the state fair," he said.

So this year we have something looking like this:

 Seriously, if I were an Iowan, I'd bring back the original.  I do love the ridiculousness of last year's trophy.  Maybe people would have appreciated it more if somebody from the government was featured giving the farmer a direct payment. 

And if you missed it last night, Cincinnati beat Pitt for the also awful Paddlewheel trophy.

Beanpot Finals

Boston College plays Boston University tonight in the Beanpot tournament final, while Northeastern and Harvard meet in the consolation game.

The First Land Grant Colleges

February 12, 1855:

Michigan State University is established. Michigan State University (MSU) is a public research university in East Lansing, Michigan, USA. Founded in 1855, it was the pioneer land-grant institution and served as a model for future land-grant colleges in the United States under the 1862 Morrill Act.
The Michigan Constitution of 1850 called for the creation of an "agricultural school", though it was not until February 12, 1855, that Michigan Governor Kinsley S. Bingham signed a bill establishing the United States' first agriculture college, the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan.  Classes began on May 13, 1857, with three buildings, five faculty members, and 63 male students. The first president, Joseph R. Williams, designed a curriculum that required more scientific study than practically any undergraduate institution of the era. It balanced science, liberal arts, and practical training. The curriculum excluded Latin and Greek studies, since most applicants did not study any classical languages in their rural high schools. However, it did require three hours of daily manual labor, which kept costs down for both the students and the College.  Despite Williams' innovations and his defense of education for the masses, the State Board of Education saw Williams' curriculum as elitist. They forced him to resign in 1859 and reduced the curriculum to a two-year vocational program.
In 1860, Joseph R. Williams became acting lieutenant governor and helped pass the Reorganization Act of 1861. This gave the College a four-year curriculum and the power to grant master's degrees. Under the act, a newly created body, known as the State Board of Agriculture, took over from the State Board of Education in running the institution. The College changed its name to State Agricultural College, and its first class graduated in the same year. As the Civil War had just begun, there was no time for an elaborate graduation ceremony. The first alumni enlisted to the Union Army. Williams died, and the following year, Abraham Lincoln signed the First Morrill Act of 1862 to support similar colleges, making the Michigan school a national model.

Then:

The school (Penn State) was founded as a degree-granting institution on February 22, 1855, by act P.L. 46, No. 50 of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as the Farmers' High School of Pennsylvania. Centre County, Pennsylvania, became the home of the new school when James Irvin of Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, donated 200 acres (0.8 km²) of land – the first of 10,101 acres (41 km²) the school would eventually acquire. In 1862, the school's name was changed to the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania, and with the passage of the Morrill Land-Grant Act, Pennsylvania selected the school in 1863 to be the state's sole land-grant college. In the following years, enrollment fell as the school tried to balance purely agricultural studies with a more classic education, falling to 64 undergraduates in 1875, a year after the school's name changed once again to the Pennsylvania State College.  George W. Atherton became president of the school in 1882, and broadened the school's curriculum. Shortly after he introduced engineering studies, Penn State became one of the ten-largest engineering schools in the nation. Atherton also expanded the liberal arts and agriculture programs, for which the school began receiving regular appropriations from the state in 1887.

Back before they became the anti-intellectual party of the south, the Republican party favored public education.  The schools history as the first land grant colleges caused them to create the Land Grant Trophy when Penn State joined the Big Ten.  The trophy is regularly mocked as one of the dumbest rivalry trophies ever, although it faces some pretty stiff competition out there.

Beanpot Semis Today

Northeastern meets Boston College and Harvard faces Boston University in the annual Beanpot tournament this evening.

Insight Bowl Highlight

The Insight Bowl trophy is especially odd looking:

So far as I know, the main highlight of that bowl game is when the ESPN Skycam crashed onto the field:



It was extremely lucky that that didn't hurt somebody.

College Football Trophies- Famous Idaho Potato Bowl Edition

Here:

Apparently, the potatos are an add-on, as Frank Solich celebrates in an empty stadium:

Way to bring the Potato Bowl home, Bobcats.  During the game, I saw a couple of Idaho Potato ads.  While the ads featuring the landscape were entertaining, everybody knows sex sells:

College Football Rivalry Trophies

This week, Wyoming and Colorado State play for the Bronze Boot:

Also, Wisconsin and Michigan State play for the Stagg Championship Trophy, formerly the Paterno-Stagg Championship Trophy:

College Football Rivalry Trophies- November 26 Edition

Today, Nebraska and Iowa play for the Heroes Game Trophy.  Here is CBS Sports coverage:

Give credit to Iowa and Nebraska for this: the concept of naming their new annual rivalry game the "Heroes Game" and using it as a platform for celebrating "local heroes" is an original, engaging, endearingly Midwestern concept.

So it's a minor shame the trophy unveiled this week to be awarded to the winner -- and upon which the names of said heroes will be engraved -- doesn't quite live up to the uniqueness of the concept. Here it is:

Also, LSU and Arkansas will play for a spot in the SEC Championship Game, and the Golden Boot Trophy:

Saturday, Missouri and Kansas play for the Lamar Hunt Trophy and the Indian War Drum:



Lamar Hunt Trophy



Tennessee and Kentucky used to play for the Beer Barrel Trophy, but got rid of the trophy after some students died in an alcohol-related accident:



Oregon and Oregon State play for the Platypus Trophy (because it has a duck bill and a beaver tail, no kidding):

photo from: Mickey Mantle's Liver

Washington and Washington State play for the Apple Cup:

Alabama and Auburn play in the Iron Bowl for the Foy Trophy:

Stanford and Notre Dame play for the Legends Trophy:

Mississippi and Mississippi State play for the Golden Egg Trophy:

And finally (there are some others, but they can wait for next year), Indiana and Purdue will play for the Old Oaken Bucket:

Also, Ohio State and Michigan play.  Normally it is for a share of the Big Ten title, but this year, it is only for pride.  I wish Governors Snyder and Kasich had bet that the governor from the winning state got to punch the other governor in the face, but alas, they didn't.