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A massive college football story broke while I was on vacation last week. No, not anything about the House settlement, or NIL, or coaching changes, or anything else. I’m talking about new trophy for the Idaho/Idaho State football rivalry.

The Potato State Trophy.

Sadly, I was not able to attend Big Sky Media Days and get information about the trophy myself. Fortunately for us, Andrew Houghton was on the scene and graciously offered to get the facts that Extra Points readers so badly need to know.

Houghton was an award-winning sportswriter at newspapers in Georgia and Idaho before he moved to Missoula, Montana, where he currently produces a daily sports talk radio show. He also writes for Skyline Sports, an independent media outlet covering the Big Sky Conference. For Skyline, he’s written features on Idaho football, NBA Draft pick Dillon Jones and much, much more. You can find him on Twitter @AndrewH202.

His dispatch is below:

Big Sky Conference football media days are not generally a place for minting national celebrities – but this year proved an exception. 

The showstealer wasn’t either of the preseason MVPs, UC Davis running back Lan Larison or Montana State defensive end Brody Grebe. It wasn’t commissioner Tom Wistrcill, who announced an extension to the conference’s media rights deal with ESPN. It wasn’t even Bobby Hauck, whose Montana Grizzlies are looking to make a run back to the FCS national title game. 

No, the superstar of the weekend in Spokane was a 20-pound hunk of wood carved in the shape of a potato. 

That’s right, Idaho and Idaho State have a new rivalry trophy, it’s a gigantic wooden potato, and for several hours on Sunday, its unveiling had College Football Twitter in a chokehold.

“BIGGEST NEWS OF THE DAY BY FAR,” ESPN’s Bill Connelly breathlessly tweeted.

Within 24 hours of the reveal, the college football Sickos Committee had given the trophy its stamp of approval, both online and in-person with a sticker slapped onto the base.

Graphics released along with the trophy offered a few tantalizing facts, like its official name (the Potato State Trophy), weight (19.4 pounds) and material (Douglas fir) – intriguing but not enough to satisfy the internet’s thirst for its new obsession. Luckily, Extra Points had a correspondent on the scene at the Big Sky media days, and I’m here to answer every question you might have about college football’s newest rivalry trophy.

Idaho and Idaho State have a football rivalry?

They do, although not an excessively storied or competitive one. Idaho (located in Moscow) and Idaho State (located in Pocatello) first played in 1916, a 32-0 win for Idaho. But they played just once more between then and 1962, the year before both teams became charter members of the new Big Sky Conference. Starting in 1965, they played every year up until 1996, when Idaho jumped to the Big West Conference in what was then called Division I-A. They played just four times during Idaho’s I-A/FBS interregnum, but have played every year since the Vandals came back to the Big Sky in 2018. Idaho, which won the first eight games in the rivalry and four of six since returning to the Big Sky, leads the all-time series 32-13, including a forfeit in 1978 (according to Wikipedia, “on game day, one of two vintage aircraft carrying the ISU team had mechanical issues and returned to Pocatello”) and a 63-21 beatdown last season at the Kibbie Dome in Moscow.

If the rivalry’s been going for over a century, why did they get a new trophy this year?

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