Brother, Can You Spare A Nickel?
It's been more than 20 years since in-state rivals North Dakota and North Dakota State played for their unique rivalry trophy.
Quirks separate college football from its professional counterpart.
This is a key reason I rail against the NFL’ization of the college game as monied entities continuously pursue the sport’s homogenization. There’s a concerted effort to turn the Big Ten and SEC into the AFC and NFC, and in doing so, power-brokers threaten to strip college football of what has ingratiated the game with fans for 155 years.
Simply put: Take away the character of college football, and you’re left with an inferior product played by younger, lesser skilled athletes.
Rivalry trophies symbolize this quirkiness. I love rivalry trophies. The more peculiar the trophy, or the odder the backstory, the better. Give me all the wooden pigs, all the spittoons, all the wheels you can find.
Take the Little Brown Jug. When Michigan held off Minnesota in Week 5, the scene broadcasted from the Big House resembled the celebration of a clinched conference championship. Wolverines rallied around the Little Brown Jug, a nearly-120-year-old artifact born of Fielding Yost’s paranoia1, holding the artifact up to a jubilant student section.
So much of the college experience in general is about reveling in a university’s traditions and those of its associated clubs. That includes the athletic programs, which remain fundamental pillars of the overall university identity — until private equity firms invade the football space and turn those teams into professional outfits that license schools’ branding. But that’s another matter.
Rivalry trophies represent some of what is being eroded from the sport. So imagine my disappointment knowing that after its 41-17 win over in-state rival North Dakota, North Dakota State didn’t take home the trophy that represented the series for almost seven decades.
North Dakota and North Dakota State students first met on the football field in 1894. Saturday’s meeting in Fargo was the 117th ever between the schools, and the 86-year anniversary of the first played for the Nickel Trophy.
Originally commissioned in 1937, the Nickel Trophy is exactly what the name implies: A nickel. Well, sorta: It’s a 75-pound nickel that UND alum Robert Kunkel brought to life, emulating the U.S. Mint’s Buffalo Nickel.
Columnist Patrick Reusse noted in a 2015 article for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis that the first UND-NDSU game played for the Nickel Trophy in 1938 coincided with the Mint’s discontinuation of the Buffalo Nickel.
The Nickel Trophy, on the other hand, lived on into the 21st Century.
The Bison and Fighting Hawks played 65 games with the Nickel Trophy at stake, during which North Dakota won 35 — including the 2003 matchup in Grand Forks.
While 2015 marks the more-or-less official retirement of the Nickel Trophy, 2003 was the last time the giant coin was awarded. UND’s 28-21 overtime victory marked three straight for the Fighting Hawks over the Bison, which in retrospect speaks to how dramatically things have changed since then.
To wit, North Dakota State’s won six of the seven meetings since, with five of those coming by double-digit-point margins. But 2003 was North Dakota State’s first under the direction of Craig Bohl, a coach whose tenure would forever change the identity of Bison football and the level currently known as the FCS.
In order to accomplish the latter, however, North Dakota State needed to make the jump to what was then Div. I-AA. The move came in 2004, and was made without North Dakota en tow.
With the Fighting Hawks remaining in Div. II, no future dates between the programs were set. So, in February 2004, North Dakota State athletic director Gene Taylor told the Associated Press that he hoped to see the Nickel Trophy moved to “a neutral local, such as the state Capitol in Bismarck.
“‘Put the history there, and put it on display, and let people see it,’ he said.”
And, indeed, the Nickel Trophy now resides in Bismarck at the capital city’s Heritage Center. A museum celebrating the state’s history seems a fitting spot for an in-state rivalry trophy, though having a fixed residence seems contradictory to the spirt of the Nickel — and not just because it traveled to the home city of each season’s winning team.
As this excellent article from the University of North Dakota published in 2018 details, part of the Nickel Trophy’s history became the efforts of UND and NDSU students to steal it from the other’s campus.
And what could be more indicative of the college experience than a zany scheme that befuddles one’s rival?
Although North Dakota eventually followed North Dakota State to Div. I and the FCS just a few years after the Bison, jumping in 2008, the rivalry didn’t renew in earnest until the COVID-shortened spring 2021 season. That was North Dakota’s first as a member of the MVFC, having previously played in the barely-qualifies-as-a-conference Great West and Big Sky previously.
Meanwhile, in the years between the 2003 Nickel Trophy game and the first Div. I encounter between then-non-conference counterparts UND and NDSU in 2015, North Dakota State formed a new trophy game with South Dakota State.
The Dakota Marker — an awesome rivalry trophy in its own right — was unveiled in 2004. The two most dominant programs of the present-day FCS landscape playing for a replica of the monuments that separated North and South Dakota in the territory days makes for a worthy entry into the long history of rivalry trophies.
What’s more, there’s another development since the Nickel Trophy was last awarded that softens some of the disappointment in its retirement. The original Buffalo Nickel offered an ideal template for the series with its depiction of a buffalo (bison) on one side, and a Native on the other.
UND, long nicknamed the Fighting Sioux, was among the longest holdouts in sports using Indigenous imagery. A symbol of its athletic programs continuing to invoke Natives, as is the case in the Nickel Trophy, would provide an annual reminder of the contentious move from Fighting Sioux to Fighting Hawks.
From this perspective, converting the Nickel Trophy into a historical monument is probably the right move. I do hope the programs introduce a new rivalry trophy at some point, though initial efforts proved abortive. The North Dakota legislature nixed a proposed $10,000 grant to commission creation of a replacement.
Someone should step up to handle the matter — otherwise, the rivalry might get saddled with some cringey Reddit nonsense. And no trophy is better than a Reddit trophy.
The legend goes that Yost sent a student manager to buy a container for fear Minnesota supporters would do something to Michigan’s water during their 1903 game. After the Golden Gophers forced a tie with the Wolverines, Yost was said to have left the jug at Northrop Field.