Fresno State–San Diego State football rivalry
American college football rivalry

The Fresno State–San Diego State football rivalry is an American college football rivalry between the Fresno State Bulldogs football team of California State University, Fresno and San Diego State Aztecs football team of San Diego State University (SDSU). Both schools are members of the Mountain West Conference. The winner of the game receives "The Old Oil Can" trophy.
History
The rivalry dates back to 1923 when the two teams competed in the Southern California Junior College Conference. The Aztecs won 12–2 at home. Since then, the sides have met 52 more times, including every year from 1945 to 1979, when the two competed in the same conference or were independents. After not facing one another between 1979 and 1991, the schools resumed the annual series from 1992 to 1998, when both were members of the Western Athletic Conference. In 1999 the Aztecs were one of eight teams that left the WAC to form the Mountain West Conference (MW), which put the rivalry on hold. The two teams however met in 2002 in Fresno. The Bulldogs defeated the Aztecs in a close game 16–14.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Fresno State–San Diego State football rivalry” is american college football rivalry. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Fresno, State and Diego, not as a finished interpretation.
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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 Q16972172. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1923, 1945, 1979 and 1991.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fresno State–San Diego State football rivalry” 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.