Old Oaken Bucket
college football rivalry trophy between Indiana and Purdue
The Old Oaken Bucket is a traveling trophy awarded in American college football as part of the rivalry between the Indiana Hoosiers football team of Indiana University and Purdue Boilermakers football team of Purdue University. It was first awarded in 1925.
Indiana and Purdue first met on the gridiron in 1891. The rivalry has been renewed annually in peacetime with some exceptions. Purdue leads the overall series 77–44–6. Like many rivalry games, the game is played during the final week of the college football season.
History of the trophy
The concept of a trophy for football games played annually between Purdue University and Indiana University was first proposed during a joint meeting of the Chicago chapters of the Indiana and Purdue alumni organizations in 1925:
"discuss the possibility of undertaking worthy joint enterprises in behalf of the two schools."
During that meeting Indiana alumnus Dr. Clarence Jones and Purdue alumnus Russel Gray were appointed to propose a suitable trophy. At a subsequent meeting in Chicago Jones and Gray recommended some oaken bucket be that trophy and the chapters drafted the resolution that:
"an old oaken bucket as the most typical Hoosier form of trophy, that the bucket should be taken from some well in Indiana, and that a chain to be made of bronze block "I" and "P" letters should be provided for the bucket. The school winning the traditional football game each year should have possession of the "Old Oaken Bucket" until the next game and should attach the block letter representing the winning school to the bail with the score engraved on the latter link."
Purdue alumnus Fritz Ernst and Indiana alumnus Whiley J. Huddle were appointed to find a suitable oak bucket.
“Old Oaken Bucket” enters the record as college football rivalry trophy between Indiana and Purdue. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Oaken, Bucket and college can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7084648. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1925 and 1891.
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This entry incorporates text from “Old Oaken Bucket” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.