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Here's a little Friday Fun post:

12 Unusual College Football Trophies
As the college football season kicks off, teams are ready to vie for the two national championship trophies. But that’s not the only hardware that will change hands this season, since many intercollegiate rivalries have their own special trophies. Some are pretty standard silver cups or plaques, while others are a bit more esoteric. Here are a few of our favorites.

6. Wisconsin vs. Minnesota—Paul Bunyan’s Axe
Wisconsin-Minnesota is the oldest rivalry in the NCAA’s Division I Football Bowl Subdivision; it stretches all the way back to 1890. The two teams have met 117 times, and since 1948 have duked it out for Paul Bunyan’s Axe, which is a pretty neat trophy. However, the giant axe is no match for the more bizarre trophy it replaced, the Slab of Bacon. The Slab of Bacon was just a piece of walnut wood topped with a football that featured carvings of the games’ scores. From 1930 to 1942, the Slab of Bacon traveled to the winner’s campus, but after the Gophers won in 1943, coach George Hauser refused the trophy. (This sort of killjoy behavior would be tolerable from, say, Knute Rockne, but Hauser’s career record was only 15-11-1.) The Slab of Bacon was misplaced, and the schools thought it had been lost forever. In 1994, though, Wisconsin’s athletic department found it in a closet during a renovation, and now it’s proudly on display in their offices.

7. Minnesota vs. Michigan—The Little Brown Jug
Something about Minnesota just invites odd trophies. The Little Brown Jug, which goes to the winner of the Minnesota-Michigan game, dates all the way back to 1903. When Michigan coach Fielding Yost took his squad to Minnesota that year, he was worried that the Minnesota fans might resort to any sort of chicanery they needed to pull out a win, including tampering with the Wolverines’ drinking water. The coaching staff dispatched student manager Thomas B. Roberts to buy a vessel for clean water, and Roberts returned with a five-gallon jug he’d purchased for 30 cents. When Gopher fans stormed the field at the end of the tie game (the first game Michigan hadn’t won during Yost’s entire tenure as coach), the Wolverines left the jug behind. When a janitor brought the jug to the to the Gophers’ coaching staff, they wrote the score of the game on the side. Although Yost asked the Gophers to return his jug, they quipped that he’d have to win it back, and a traveling trophy was born.

8. Minnesota vs. Iowa—Floyd of Rosedale
In 1935, Minnesota Governor Floyd B. Olson made a little wager with Iowa Governor Clyde Herring. The previous year’s contest between the Hawkeyes and Gophers had been a bit contentious as Minnesota players gunned for Iowa’s African-American running back Ozzie Simmons. So the two governors thought a bet might alleviate the simmering tensions. Olson sent Herring a telegram proposing that the winning team’s governor would get a prize hog from the loser’s state. Herring happily accepted, and the two men started making jokes about their bet to lighten the mood. (Not everyone saw the fun, though; activists in Iowa tried to get Herring in trouble for breaking gambling laws. For his part, Herring gamely retorted that it wasn’t gambling if Minnesota had no chance of winning.)

Minnesota won the game 13-7, and the following week, Herring showed up at the Minnesota Capitol building with a live hog in tow. The pig was named Floyd of Rosedale after Minnesota’s governor and the Iowa town where it was born. Sculptor Charles Brioscho made a trophy in Floyd’s likeness, and it’s still passed between the two teams.

Read more at: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/17964