Rings A Bell – Football — Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets

Rings A Bell: Celebrating the 100^th anniversary of a fiercely contested, mostly forgotten piece of Georgia Tech football history

Inside The Chart | By Andy Demetra (The Voice of the Yellow Jackets)

The Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association is recognized as the first conference in college sports, founded in the spring of 1888 by delegates from Albion, Hillsdale, Olivet, and the State Agricultural College of Michigan (which later ditched that name for the less-unwieldy Michigan State).

Four years later, not content with staying put at four members, the MIAA expanded for the first time, welcoming in Michigan State Normal School (now Eastern Michigan) from Ypsilanti.

So for all the pearl clutching and existential hand wringing, let the record show:  conference realignment has existed for nearly as long as conferences themselves. It’s as normal a part of college sports as the Normal School that first jumped ship more than 130 years ago.

What’s old is new again – and the casualties of those changes ring as true now as they did then. Series get shuttered. Regional powerhouses get left behind.

And occasionally, once-heated rivalry trophies get forgotten.

In November 1892, the same year as that first conference shakeup in Michigan, Georgia Tech and Vanderbilt met in Tech’s second-ever football game at Piedmont Park in Atlanta. Their rivalry only deepened as they navigated the conference frontier together. Tech and Vandy both joined the fledgling Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association in 1896, then moved to the Southern Conference within a year of each other in the early 1920s. A decade later they left to become charter members of a plucky upstart named the Southeastern Conference.

And on November 15, 1924, Georgia Tech and Vanderbilt, two schools conjoined by conference play, raised the stakes of their series by adding a rivalry trophy to it: a small, silver-plated cowbell with the winning team’s name and score on it.

That trophy, once fiercely contested, has been mostly forgotten, its notoriety petering out after Tech left the SEC to become independent in 1963. The Yellow Jackets and Commodores have only played four times in the last 60 years, most recently a 38-7 Tech win at Bobby Dodd Stadium at Hyundai Field in 2016. The teams don’t have another regular-season game scheduled in the future.

The cowbell, it seems, became an early casualty of conference realignment.

And yet, the Georgia Tech-Vanderbilt cowbell is older than some of college…