‘Old Ironsides’: WVU’s lost trophy with Pitt and Penn State

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (WBOY) — West Virginia University has many rivalries across its long history of playing football, some of which have come with trophies. However, a trophy exists that the Mountaineers once fought two of their biggest rivals for, but nobody has seen it in 40 years.

According to WVU’s Senior Director of Athletic Content John Antonik, in 1951, the Pittsburgh Junior Chamber of Commerce created a three-sided, four-foot tall, more than 100-pound steel box with a football on top to serve as a trophy for the region’s “Big Three” schools: WVU, Pitt and Penn State.

“Having three teams on it, pretty rare. It’s kind of hard—you have a lot of ties. Because one team beats the other team, then it’s a tie if you don’t win outright,” Antonik said. “Particularly for West Virginia back then it was hard to do.”

Antonik said that in the 50s and early 60s, the trophy and the three-way rivalry were “very prominent.” However, by the late 60s, its popularity began to diminish. Antonik believes that a few factors contributed to this, including the emergence of Syracuse as a new regional rival as well as Penn State’s dominance at the time.

“By that time, the Old Ironsides trophy kind of fell by the wayside. By the mid-70s, there really wasn’t much reference to it at all. But it was big at the time,” Antonik said. “The reality is that it spent most of its time in Rec Hall at Penn State. […] They had it every year.”

Antonik said that despite being one of the three schools competing for it, WVU only won the trophy and possessed it one time in 1953, though they kept it through 1954 due to a tie.

By the 80s, Antonik said that local rivalries had fallen off as a top priority in favor of schools competing for the Lambert Trophy, which was awarded to the best football team in the East. He added that this time period was an especially tense one between the athletics staff at Pitt and Penn State, so agreeing on anything—including the exchange of an increasingly meaningless trophy—was hard to do.

“They were fighting like cats and dogs. They couldn’t agree on anything,” Antonik said. “There was a whole bunch of pettiness going on between those two schools, so anything that fell into that type of thing was not going to be a big deal to Pitt or Penn State.”

All of these factors contributed to the ultimate abandonment of the trophy and the three-way rivalry concept in 1984. That year, WVU had beaten both Penn State and Pitt for the first time in 31 years, but when WVU’s staff requested that Penn State send it to them, it was nowhere to be found.

Nobody has seen the trophy since then, and searches of Penn State’s museum by football historians have proven fruitless. However, if he had to guess, Antonik believes that it’s “probably stuck in some storage room up in State College someplace if it’s not been melted down.”

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