Michigan–Michigan State football rivalry
American college football rivalry
The Battle for the Paul Bunyan Trophy is an American college football rivalry between the Michigan Wolverines and the Michigan State Spartans. The teams have met 118 times since 1898, including in every year since 1945.
The winner of each year's game receives the Paul Bunyan – Governor of Michigan Trophy, a four-foot wooden statue of a lumberjack. It was first presented in 1953, when Michigan State football began competing as a member of the Big Ten Conference.
Michigan leads the series with an overall record of 75–38–5, in part because Michigan State won only two games (in 1913 and 1915, under head coach John Macklin) and tied three others in the first 28 years of the rivalry. Since 1968, the series is 39-19 in favor of Michigan.
Forty-four of the first 50 games were played on Michigan's home field; the teams began alternating home fields in 1958. The game has never been contested anywhere besides Ann Arbor or East Lansing.
The Spartans won four consecutive games from 1934 to 1937 under head coach Charlie Bachman, then lost 12 in a row after the arrival of Fritz Crisler as Michigan's head coach in 1938. The Spartans' longest run of success against the Wolverines was in the 1950s and 1960s, when they went 14–4–2 under head coaches Biggie Munn and Duffy Daugherty.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Michigan–Michigan State football rivalry” is american college football rivalry. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Michigan, State and football, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Michigan–Michigan 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.