FanHouse is counting down the ten best, ten worst, and ten weirdest moments in Big Ten football history.
Illibuck. Paul Bunyan's Axe. The Little Brown Jug. Floyd of Rosedale. The Big Ten has some legendary rivalries, and those rivalries have some legendary trophies associated with them.
We're not here to talk about those, however. No, we're going to talk about those two things you see pictured above. One is a trophy affiliated with two natural rivals who, until very recently, didn't have a trophy to pass back and forth between them. The other commemorates a rivalry which came about because both teams involved needed a rival so their rivalry could be protected.
We'll start with the trophy on the right, the one that looks like it fell off the roof of a Ponderosa Steakhouse. That's the Heartland Trophy. It goes to the winner of the Iowa-Wisconsin game. Those two schools have been playing each other for decades but the trophy has only been around since 2004. Sure, it's not the stuff of legend, but the Hawkeye-Badger rivalry is as close as any. Wisconsin leads the all-time series, 41-40-2.
You don't want to know about that, though. You want to know about that thing on the left. That's what I'm here for.
Though it may look like something your grandmother would hang on the wall of her kitchen, it's actually the Land Grant Trophy, awarded to the winner of the annual Penn State-Michigan State game. When the Nits joined the conference in 1993, they needed some protected rivalries just like all the other schools in the conference had. Establishing one with Ohio State was a given, what with the Big 33 Classic and all, but they needed another rival.
Fortunately, Michigan State was in need of a second rival. Their annual game with Michigan was already protected, but there wasn't an obvious candidate for #2. Never mind that these two schools had only played each other ten times previously, and not at all in almost thirty years. They were made for each other.
The trophy's name commemorates the Morrill Land Grant Act, something you slept through in high school history class. It was a bill which used the sale of public land to establish schools of agriculture in every state. Penn State and Michigan State are both land-grant universities. So there. It isn't just a nutty, made-up rivalry designed to plug a hole in the Big Ten's scheduling scheme.
Man, that's one atrocious trophy, however.
