The story of the old painted-up water jug that Michigan and Minnesota have competed for for more than a century is a splash of attractive color on the giant tapestry college football.
The conditions that created the Little Brown Jug nearly 125-years ago as the sport's first traveling trophy are interesting both because they illuminate an important era in the sport’s history, and because the Jug itself continues to carry meaning and value for both football programs and the Big Ten Conference.
In 1903, the year of the Jug's event horizon, Michigan was coached by Fielding Yost, one of the sport’s true Titans, and his Wolverines were both the behemoths of the Big Ten and the best evidence available that Midwestern football had arrived as national power. Despite the early date the Big Ten, which at the time was called the Western Conference, was already approaching its 10th year of existence. But Minnesota and Michigan traced their own series back even further, to 1892, three-years prior to the league's creation.
Michigan had taken an early 4-2 series lead, but each of the games had been extremely rough and left both squads limping from the battle plain afterward. Yost, who at that point had only coached in one meeting, a 23-6 victory in 1902, was fully aware of the Golden Gophers’ affinity for rough play under their steely head coach, a former Yale man called Dr. Henry Williams. The doctor had gone to Minneapolis from the ultimate winning football tradition at Yale, and he conceded absolutely nothing to Yost’s Machine. Williams expected to defeat Michigan, period.
Yost’s 1903 squad had debarked its train in Minneapolis with the confidence of a 29 game winning streak squaring away its shoulders. Not only had the Wolverines not been defeated since Yost arrived prior to the 1901 season, his Point-A-Minute squads had outscored its opposition by a staggering margin of 1,631 to 12, while its defense had shut out 27 of 29 opponents.
But it had been this same Minnesota team the previous season that scored half of those 12 points during a 17-point loss in Ann Arbor, which was playing the Wolverines mighty close. In the three games prior to that Gophers' effort, Michigan had outscored Iowa, Chicago, and Oberlin by a combined score of 191-0.
The Gophers had finished the 1901 season at 9-1-1, and the 1902 campaign at 9-2-1. Minnesota entered the ’03 game against Michigan with a perfect 10-0 record and a chance to win the Western Conference championship, which it had last claimed in 1900.
Yost, who liked to say that those who didn’t worry didn’t win, was worried about potential skulduggery at Minnesota’s Northrop Field. The Michigan coach believed that the hard-nosed Dr. Williams was willing to do anything to win, and that his unbridled intensity might lead him to tamper with the game’s competitive conditions.
In the grips of that paranoia Yost had dispatched his student manager into the city to buy a jug for the team’s game-day water, which presumably would prevent Williams from poisoning Michigan's refreshments. Somewhere in the Dinkytown neighborhood of Minnesota's campus, the manager found his way into a hardware store and purchased a 5-gallon 'Beehive Jug' for $.30 cents.
The Red Wing Pottery brand vessel had been manufactured in the eponymous city of Redwing, Minnesota, a little town built near the banks of the Mississippi River about 50 miles southeast of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. The Wolverines filled it with water from their own hogshead and toted the tub down to the field.
More than 30,000 fans piled into old Norhtrop Stadium on a Halloween Saturday to watch the battle. Grown men and children alike who could not get into the stadium shimmied and climbed up into the boughs of the trees outside the ballpark, high enough to peer over the stadium walls and watch the Gophers attempt to stand up to the Blitzkrieging Wolverines for the Big Ten title.
Telegraph and phone lines were cleared so that real-time updates could be delivered to fan parties in both Minneapolis and Ann Arbor, much like our digital game-casts work today. The New York Times in its Sunday edition would describe the battle as: "One of the most desperate football games seen in the West in years."
The Gophers had demonstrated their mettle in a physically brutal contest—which included multiple incidents of slugging in the pile ups, a tactic that coach Williams had brought from the Eastern Circuit in the 1880s and 1890s. Pudge Heffelfinger, who had been Williams' teammate at Yale, and the first professional football player in American history, demonstrated the old attitude from the Minnesota sideline, where he was an assistant coach.
During Williams' and Heffelfinger's playing days the standard operating procedure had been to hurt the opposing team's best player badly enough that he could not keep competing. For Michigan that was running back Willie Heston, who would become one of the Wolverines' all-time All-American players.
Heffelfinger reportedly was heard several times shouting from the Gophers' sideline: "Kill of Heston!"
It was a mantra that the fans at one point took up themselves and chanted. Michigan was getting the extra-rough treatment everywhere it went as a consequence of its massive success, and the Minnesota game was amongst the hardest they'd played.
Heston said afterward that "The Minnesota players were the roughest lot of sluggers I ever went up against."
But the Gophers also made the hell of a showing on both sides of the ball, holding Michigan's steamroller offense to just six points, while its own offense continued to threaten the Wolverines' goal line in both halves before finally being turned back. When the boys from Ski-U-Mah finally did crash over the Michigan goal line to tie the score with just two minutes left on the clock, the ecstatic fans emptied out of the stands and stormed the field in a jubilation.
By the time the referees had cleared most of the mob from the field the late-October twilight was so deep that the teams agreed to end the game in a 6-6 tie. But Yost was furious that his team was stripped of its opportunity to mount a winning drive. Those six points would be the only points that Michigan surrendered all season, and half of the Gophers' total, who would outscore their own opponents, 656-12.
Yost told newspapers that the game was extremely physical but declined to make any claims of foul play. He said that Minnesota was a tough group of kids and played that way, which was a fact of life that his team would have to either overcome or submit to.
"Minnesota has a great team, and I wish we might play them again," Yost said.
The Minneapolis newspapers, for their part, ran headlines that suggested the Gophers had won the game outright. The big edition of the Sunday Tribune had gone with a banner headline that you'd generally see reserved for a declaration of war:
MINNESOTA SUPREME IN WESTERN FOOTBALL!
The sub-headline, which was only slightly more factual, read: Victory, Though the Score is Tied.
Minnesota would finish the season at 14-0-1 (3-0-1 Big Ten) and shared the Western Conference crown with the 11-0-1 Wolverines.
The tie game with the Gophers did not check Michigan's advance at all. Over the next two seasons the Wolverines would run their unbeaten streak to 55-0-1, including a fourth straight Western Conference title in 1904, before Amos Alonzo Stagg and his Chicago Maroons knocked them off, 2-0, in college football’s first so-called Game of the Century to end the 1905 season.
But it was in the aftermath of that '03 game in Minneapolis, when Michigan had rushed off the field to evade the storming fans, that Yost’s student manager had left behind the jug and fulfilled the will of the gods. The morning after the game a man named Oscar Munson, the custodian at the U of Minnesota, discovered the earthen crock abandoned along Michigan's bench and brought it to LJ Cooke, the chief over Minnesota's athletic department.
Cooke admired the jug as a totem of battle and instructed the janitor to paint it up: “Michigan Jug captured by Oscar, October 31, 1903.” The 6-6 score was painted on, too, but the 6 next to MN was made huge while the 6 next to Michigan was made miniscule. A rope was fed through the hoop-handle and the tub was hoisted into the rafters over Cooke’s desk, where it would hang as a piece of arcane bric-a-brac for years.
The two schools did not play again for five seasons, in large part to allow the aggression between the two programs to dissipate. But when Michigan returned to Minneapolis in 1909, Yost had visited Cooke in his office and spotted the vaguely familiar jug hanging from the ceiling. When Yost was informed that it was a battle trophy from the schools' 1903 game he'd laughed out loud and said: “Well that’s the first I’ve heard about that!”
Later that same day, when captains from the two teams were brought together for a pregame meeting, Minnesota's representatives had suggested that the jug could be played for as a traveling trophy. Everyone from Michigan was amenable to the idea—competing for a cheap clay water jug sounded about as good as anything else—and it was agreed upon without further discussion. From that moment forward at stake in the rivalry was the possession of an aging, $.30-cent jug that Michigan had purchased in Dinkytown to prevent the Minnesota team from poisoning them.
The 1909 game between the schools was unique because Michigan was in the middle of a nine-year exile from the Big Ten due to major disagreements on a new set of conference rules. Despite the novel circumstances, the Wolverines had upset the Big Ten champion Gophers, 15-6, and were awarded the Jug at a "purity banquet" following the game.
Purity banquets, which were essentially post-game dinners and speeches between the opposing players and coaches, were used during college football’s early years to solidify amity and concord between academic institutions. Football in those days had a tendency to get a little rougher, and a little uglier, than the academics were comfortable with, and the banquets were a way to keep things civilized.
During the dinner the Gophers’ coach, Dr. Williams, had concocted a story to give the Jug some juice, and claimed that Minnesota had stolen it from Michigan following the 1903 bloodbath as a trophy of war. It wasn't true, but both sides agreed that it made the Jug a little-hotter potato for the boys at the newspapers to bat around, and more fun for the fans to parry over.
After a return game in Ann Arbor in 1910, also won by Michigan, it would be almost a decade before the schools played again. Despite the rivalry’s popularity, and its profitability, for both institutions, the Big Ten forbade its teams from scheduling games against any former conference members. Since Michigan was the only team to have ever left, what the conference meant was that its teams were forbidden from playing Michigan.
That policy would, over time—as Michigan struggled to establish new rivalries outside of the Midwest, and to keep its fans sufficiently interested in a slapdash schedule—isolate the Wolverines and make them homesick. Eventually Michigan adjusted its athletic policies, reorganized its faculty board, and was welcomed back into the league in 1917.
By 1919 their series w/the Gophers resumed and the Jug, soon renamed the Little Brown Jug, remained the prize. Minnesota won that first game back, 34-7, at Ferry Field in Ann Arbor, and took home the Jug, by rights, for the first time. The schools have played for it ever since.
In 2014 I sat in the huge bowl of Michigan Stadium—Yost's Hole In the Ground, as some called it back in 1926-1927 when it was being built—watching my first game in Ann Arbor. By some strange quirk of fate I bore witness as the Gophers upset the Wolverines, 30-14, and captured the Jug for just the second time in the preceding 35 meetings.
As the game ended the Gophers' players charged across the field to Michigan’s sideline in a rollicking Maroon-and-Gold mass to collect their 101-year-old prize. The team, grouped together in a giant pack, paraded it around the stadium, pumping the now painted-up totem into the air, before marching it to the corner where the Gophers’ fans had congregated to hold it aloft for all to marvel at. The Minnesotans cheered and saluted and high-fived one another and left wearing the kind of smile that only the Jug can produce.
It was a kind of unapologetic and un-self-conscious tribal display that the anthropologists would have a good time trying to explain. The Little Brown Jug Game is college football at its handsomest and most charming.
While there have been competitive decades between the schools—like the 1930s, when the Gophers went 6-3-1, and the 1960s, when Minnesota finished 6-4—the Wolverines have been thoroughly dominant and lead the overall series 78-25-3 as of 2024.
But no matter what happens, when the teams meet each autumn the Jug will be there on the sideline, betraying no prejudice or favor, waiting for the winner to come and collect.
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