For the first time in history, the Birmingham Bowl will be BYOT.
Bring Your Own Trophy.
When Georgia Tech and Vanderbilt face off at Protective Stadium on December 27, they’ll of course play for the replica of the Vulcan statue that annually goes to the game’s winner.
But the Birmingham Bowl also gives the Yellow Jackets and Commodores a chance to renew a longstanding rivalry – and in the process, revive an obscure, almost forgotten rivalry trophy.
For seven decades, Tech and Vanderbilt met as conference opponents. They 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 1920’s. A decade later they became charter members, along with Alabama and Auburn, of a plucky upstart named the Southeastern Conference.
And 100 years ago last month, Georgia Tech and Vanderbilt raised the stakes of their series by adding a small, eclectic rivalry trophy: a silver-plated cowbell with the winning team’s name and score on it.
The trophy went dormant once Georgia Tech left the SEC in 1963, the result of an impasse with the University of Alabama. The Yellow Jackets and Commodores have only met four times in the last 60 years, most recently a 38-7 Tech win in 2016.
And yet, the Georgia Tech-Vanderbilt cowbell is older than some of college football’s most iconic trophies like Paul Bunyan’s Axe or the Floyd of Rosedale. And as cowbell traditions go, it predates the most famous one by more than a decade. Cowbells didn’t become a staple at Mississippi State football games until the late 1930’s.
But thanks to the Birmingham Bowl, Georgia Tech and Vanderbilt meet once again, ensuring their century-old trophy – with its humble origins, cloak-and-dagger hijinks, and fateful recovery days before their most recent meeting – won’t trail off into obscurity, but will continue to ring a bell.
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Georgia Tech running backs coach Norval McKenzie played at Vanderbilt from 2001 to 2004. Twice in his career, the Powder Springs, Ga., native faced Tech: a 45-3 loss in the 2002 season opener at Bobby Dodd Stadium, then a 24-17 overtime defeat at Vanderbilt Stadium a year later. McKenzie rushed for 43 yards and two touchdowns in that 2003 matchup in Nashville, which also featured a 1-yard run from fullback Clark Lea, now Vanderbilt’s head coach.
But it wasn’t until last October, two decades removed from his last game with the Commodores and in his first year on the Georgia Tech staff, that McKenzie learned he played for more than hometown bragging rights in those matchups against the Yellow Jackets.
He also competed for custody of a cowbell.
“I’m 0-and-2. Hey, fun fact of the day, right?” McKenzie said.
“I had no idea that was the case. But now I learned something.”
Whenever someone hears about the Georgia Tech-Vanderbilt cowbell trophy, it’s inevitably the first question that comes up. How did Tech and Vandy, two respected, prosperous, big city research institutes, battle over something so … agrarian?
Its origins, surprisingly, have nothing to do with cattle. The trophy was the brainchild of Ed Cavaleri, a railroad official from Augusta, Ga., described by the Atlanta Constitution as “a faithful Georgia Tech supporter though he did not attend the Jacket institution.” While on his way to the November 15, 1924, game at Grant Field, Cavaleri stopped at an Atlanta hardware store and bought a copper cowbell to use as a noisemaker.
Alas, his clanging went for naught: Vanderbilt upset Tech 3-0 after losing the previous three meetings by a combined score of 147-0.
After the game, someone suggested that Cavaleri award the cowbell as a trophy to the winning team. Out of the gloom of the loss, a tradition was born.
“The fact that he did not go to [college] and he was an Atlanta boy from way back just made Georgia Tech the logical place for him to put his loyalties,” said Cavaleri’s granddaughter, Pendy Cavaleri Bowers.
Bowers, now 71 and living in Tifton, Ga., says the cowbell remains a source of pride for her and her family. All these years later, she still has fond memories of her grandfather’s fandom for the Yellow Jackets.
“It was all Georgia Tech, all the time if you were talking about football. He had me and my little cousins singing the ‘Ramblin’ Wreck’ song and going to Grant Field,” she recalled.
Cavaleri attended every game in the series from 1924 to 1967, dutifully presenting the cowbell to a member of the winning team. He originally painted it Georgia Tech white and gold on one side and Vanderbilt black and gold on the other. On the 25th anniversary of the trophy, he silver-plated it and added a bronze plaque that listed the scores and winning team from each year.
The cowbell never got a name, but like most old trophies, it has a colorful history. Cavalieri feared the bell was lost forever following the 1935 game, a 14-13 Vanderbilt win at Grant Field.
“I’d just left the stadium, was taking the bell along to have it engraved. On a side street, near the stadium, two fellows jumped me. One pushed me down, the other grabbed the bell,” he told the Associated Press in 1964.
According to his son Ed Jr., Cavaleri posted a notice of the missing cowbell at the Georgia Tech YMCA. A pair of Tech students eventually came forward, telling him the bell was at the home of a friend in North Carolina. It was returned hours before the 1937 game.
(The cowbell didn’t miss much in the interim. The 1936 game ended in a 0-0 tie.)
More shenanigans would follow. Another time at Nashville’s Dudley Stadium, Cavaleri set the bell down during a stoppage in play. When he reached down to pick it up, a ne’er-do-well had run off with it. The following day, in response to urgent pleas on the radio, someone dropped it off on the steps of Nashville’s WSM radio.
The rivalry fizzled out and the cowbell was mostly forgotten following Georgia Tech’s withdrawal from the SEC in 1963. At the heart of their exit was the so-called “140 Rule,” which allowed SEC schools to have 140 scholarships for football and men’s basketball. The rule allowed football programs to sign as many as 45 recruits per season. Dodd believed other SEC teams were overrecruiting, cutting underperforming players to clear scholarship space for newer ones.
Dodd wanted the SEC to allow fewer signees per recruiting class. But at the SEC’s 1963 winter meetings, Alabama president Frank Rose voted to keep the rule intact. Georgia Tech announced its intention to leave the SEC and become an independent, ending more than seven decades of shared conference affiliation with Vanderbilt.
Cavaleri Sr. passed away in 1970. Tech hadn’t lost in the series since 1941, meaning the Yellow Jackets still technically had possession of the cowbell as they prepared for their meeting in 2016.
I was barely a month into my time as “Voice of the Yellow Jackets” when Sean Bedford, my former color analyst, tipped me off about the existence of the cowbell. Sean had first seen it while perusing the trophy cases in Georgia Tech’s Edge Athletics Center lobby as an undergrad. Something about a cowbell nestled in a sea of giant gold chalices felt comically out of place to him.
“[It] stood out because it was so simple (think end of ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.’ It stuck in my memory because I thought it was interesting that Tech and Vandy had a rivalry trophy,” Sean texted me.
I soon learned that Sean wasn’t alone in his obliviousness. None of the Georgia Tech players I interviewed that week had heard about the cowbell either. Hoping to speak to someone with first-hand knowledge of the trophy, I reached out to George McGugin, the grandson of College Football Hall of Famer Dan McGugin, who coached Vanderbilt from 1904-17 and again from 1919-34. Surely he could share some details about the cowbell.
“I was not familiar at all with that. You’ve enlightened me,” McGugin said.
Yet my research soon gave way to a more urgent issue that week.
Nobody, it seemed, knew where the cowbell was.
**
It was no longer in the athletics center trophy case where my analyst first spotted it. At some point, we theorized, the case was cleared of its smaller, less notable trophies. A few athletic department employees thought they had seen it on a dresser outside the athletic director’s suite. It wasn’t there either.
Days from kickoff, I suddenly found myself in the middle of a search-and-rescue operation for a cowbell.
We then took us to a second-floor storage room chockablock with old files and musty, out-of-circulation Tech memorabilia. Exploring through the rectangular room, with its dank walls and cobwebbed, mishmashed assortment of artifacts, made us feel like tomb raiders minus the torches.
We spotted a nest of plaques and dusty trophies on top of a row of metal filing cabinets. Hopeful, we rummaged through them.
No luck either.
The panic was deepening. Our list of places to look was dwindling. Ed Cavaleri recovered his cowbell on the few occasions it went missing. Was our luck about to run out? Had the last bell tolled on the Georgia Tech-Vanderbilt rivalry trophy?
Apparently, Cavaleri had one last piece of good fortune to give to us.
At an operations meeting that Tuesday, Georgia Tech director of facilities and administration Christie Hughes printed a document to Tech’s media relations printer, which was located in a supply room on the first floor of the Edge. She asked facilities manager Jackson Mathews and an intern to retrieve it.
“When we got over there, [the printer] was saying ‘Low Toner.’ I didn’t know which cabinet the toner was in, so I just started opening cabinets,” Mathews told me.
Mathews opened a pair of wooden supply cabinets on the right side of the room.
And there it was.
Sitting on a shelf, wedged between a souvenir 75th anniversary Orange Bowl football and a cardboard box of old ACC media directories. Six inches tall, smudged but still silvery, with a brown leather strap attached to the handle. A gold plate is screwed onto each side, with “GEORGIA TECH-VANDERBILT FOOTBALL TROPHY” engraved in stately font at the top, and the years, scores and winning teams inscribed in chronological order below it.
A relic of a bygone rivalry, ready to be tolled again, all thanks to a printer that was low on toner.
Who knows what circumstances led to the cowbell getting put in that supply cabinet. Perhaps it was a fitting final resting place: an obscure trophy, tucked away in an out-of-the-way location, put there by someone completely unaware of its history.
The game, unlike the search, wasn’t nearly as suspenseful. Georgia Tech routed Vanderbilt at Bobby Dodd Stadium, setting the tone with a 75-yard touchdown pass from Prattville, Ala., native Justin Thomas on the first play from scrimmage. The game also featured a remarkable full-circle moment in the series. Sophomore Will Bryan started at left guard for Georgia Tech that day; his great-grandfather, Kenneth Bryan, Sr., started at right guard for Vanderbilt when the Commodores knocked off Tech in 1924.
The Yellow Jackets and Commodores didn’t have another game scheduled after that 2016 meeting. Then came the call from the organizers of the Birmingham Bowl. And on December 27, the Vulcan won’t be the only trophy ready to be contested at Protective Stadium.
“We talked about it maybe three, four, five times,” Vanderbilt wide receiver Richie Hoskins said of the cowbell.
“It just adds a little bit more momentum to the fight,” added Georgia Tech center Weston Franklin. “We definitely need to bring the bell back here.”
Georgia Tech’s Edge Athletics Center building was demolished last March to make way for a new student-athlete performance center. Thankfully the cowbell wasn’t misplaced a second time around: for the past several months it has resided in the office of Georgia Tech assistant director of football operations Jon Blake, who joked that he should have used it this fall to alert Tech’s coaches when staff dinner was ready. It has since made its way to the Georgia Tech marketing office, which engraved the most recent score on it and will faithfully shepherd it to Birmingham.
(Ironically, Blake kept the cowbell on top of a cabinet, not inside of one, which got us into this whole mess eight years ago.)
Cavaleri Bowers won’t be at the game, though she plans on watching with her kids and grandchildren in Tifton.
“Anytime that your family leaves any kind of legacy, it’s a good thing. It makes you proud, especially when it’s a positive thing. When it’s part of your family lore, it just gives you a warm feeling. Not many things last 100 years,” Cavaleri Bowers said, reflecting on her family’s cowbell.
So, kudos, Birmingham Bowl, for allowing a quirky, little-known tradition to be told and tolled.
Come December 27, Georgia Tech and Vanderbilt will have a fever. And the only prescription is more cowbell.
Andy Demetra is the ‘Voice of the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets’. You can read his regular column “Inside the Chart” on RamblinWreck.com.
The Golden Egg is awarded to the winner of the annual matchup between the Mississippi State Bulldogs and the Ole Miss Rebels. While these two teams may not have the national prominence of some of their SEC counterparts, their rivalry is just as fierce.
The history of the Golden Egg dates back to 1927, when the trophy was created to symbolize the intense competition between the two schools. Over the years, the trophy has become a cherished symbol of pride for whichever team is able to claim victory in the matchup.
Despite the relative obscurity of the Golden Egg, the rivalry between Mississippi State and Ole Miss is just as intense as any other in the SEC. The annual matchup is a must-watch for fans of both teams, as they eagerly await to see who will come out on top and take home the coveted trophy.
So next time you’re watching an SEC game and see two teams battling it out for a seemingly insignificant trophy, remember that it’s not just a piece of metal – it’s a symbol of a longstanding rivalry that reignites the passion of old school SEC football.
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