Inside The Chart: Rings A Bell

Rings A Bell: Celebrating the 100^th anniversary of a fiercely contested, mostly forgotten piece of Georgia Tech football history

Inside The Chart | By Andy Demetra (The Voice of the Yellow Jackets)

The Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association is recognized as the first conference in college sports, founded in the spring of 1888 by delegates from Albion, Hillsdale, Olivet, and the State Agricultural College of Michigan (which later ditched that name for the less-unwieldy Michigan State).

Four years later, not content with staying put at four members, the MIAA expanded for the first time, welcoming in Michigan State Normal School (now Eastern Michigan) from Ypsilanti.

So for all the pearl clutching and existential hand wringing, let the record show:  conference realignment has existed for nearly as long as conferences themselves. It’s as normal a part of college sports as the Normal School that first jumped ship more than 130 years ago.

What’s old is new again – and the casualties of those changes ring as true now as they did then. Series get shuttered. Regional powerhouses get left behind.

And occasionally, once-heated rivalry trophies get forgotten.

In November 1892, the same year as that first conference shakeup in Michigan, Georgia Tech and Vanderbilt met in Tech’s second-ever football game at Piedmont Park in Atlanta. Their rivalry only deepened as they navigated the conference frontier together. Tech and Vandy 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 1920s. A decade later they left to become charter members of a plucky upstart named the Southeastern Conference.

And on November 15, 1924, Georgia Tech and Vanderbilt, two schools conjoined by conference play, raised the stakes of their series by adding a rivalry trophy to it: a small, silver-plated cowbell with the winning team’s name and score on it.

That trophy, once fiercely contested, has been mostly forgotten, its notoriety petering out after Tech left the SEC to become independent in 1963. The Yellow Jackets and Commodores have only played four times in the last 60 years, most recently a 38-7 Tech win at Bobby Dodd Stadium at Hyundai Field in 2016. The teams don’t have another regular-season game scheduled in the future.

The cowbell, it seems, became an early casualty of conference realignment.

And yet, the Georgia Tech-Vanderbilt cowbell is older than some of college football’s most iconic rivalry trophies like Paul Bunyan’s Axe or the Floyd of Rosedale. And as cowbell traditions go, it predates the most famous one, Mississippi State’s, by more than a decade.

So on its 100th anniversary, it’s worth dusting off this eclectic piece of college football history – with its humble origins, cloak-and-dagger hijinks, and fateful recovery days before their most recent game – so that it won’t trail off into obscurity, but will continue to ring a bell.

**

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.

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 august, well-heeled, big-city research institutes, battle over something so… agrarian?

That’s because 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.

His clanging sadly went for naught: Vanderbilt upset Tech 3-0 thanks to a 37-yard drop-kick field goal by All-American Hek Wakefield. Georgia Tech had won the previous three meetings by a combined score of 147-0.

After the game, someone suggested that Cavaleri award the trophy to the winning team. Out of the gloom of the loss, a tradition was born.

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 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 family. All these years later, she still has fond memories of her grandfather’s fandom for the 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.

As enmity goes, the series may have not burned as hot as some of Georgia Tech’s other SEC opponents like Georgia, Alabama, or Auburn. In all its years, the cowbell never even 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. The decision ended more than seven decades of shared conference affiliation between the Jackets and Commodores. Cavaleri Sr. passed away in 1970. Tech hadn’t lost in the series since 1941, meaning the Jackets still technically had possession of the cowbell as they prepared for their September 17, 2016 meeting in Atlanta.

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 cowbell and encouraged me to look into it for a column. Sean had first seen it while perusing the trophy cases in the Edge Athletics Center lobby as an undergrad from 2006-09; 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.

He didn’t know it, but I’m a sucker for a good research project – the more obscure the better. I read up on the cowbell, its quaint beginnings, and the hijinks that surrounded it. I also learned that Sean wasn’t alone in his obliviousness. None of the Georgia Tech players I interviewed that week – Harrison Butker, Pat Gamble, Rod Rook-Chungong – knew about the cowbell either.

Hoping to talk to someone with first-hand knowledge of the trophy, then-strength and conditioning coach John Sisk put me in touch with 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 gave McGugin a Cliffs Notes version of the story over the phone, figuring anything more would sound pedantic.

A pause hung in the air.

“I was not familiar at all with that. You’ve enlightened me,” McGugin replied.

Yet as I started writing my story that week, a more pressing mystery took hold.

Nobody, it seemed, knew where the cowbell was.

**

It was no longer in the Edge Center trophy case where Sean 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.

Three games into my Georgia Tech broadcasting career, I suddenly found myself pulled into an Edge Center treasure hunt. We then took our search to a second-floor storage room across from the Edge dining center, chockablock with old files and musty, out-of-circulation Tech memorabilia. A nest of plaques and dusty trophies lay on top of a row of metal filing cabinets.

We rummaged around. No luck either.

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 luck to give to us. At an operations meeting Tuesday afternoon, Christie Hughes, Georgia Tech’s director of facilities and administration, printed a document to Tech’s media relations printer, 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 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. And one more chapter in a modest, unmistakable piece of Georgia Tech history.

Who knows what circumstances led to the cowbell getting put in a 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.

Whatever the case, the cowbell was accounted for. Georgia Tech routed Vanderbilt at Bobby Dodd Stadium that weekend, setting the tone with a 75-yard touchdown pass on the first play of the game. The trophy made an appearance on the field afterwards, eventually finding its way into the hands of head coach Paul Johnson. A picture of Johnson smiling and holding the cowbell skyward was snapped, proving that even the most taciturn of people can turn downright giddy when an eccentric trophy is at stake.

The game also featured a full-circle moment in the series. Sophomore Will Bryan started at left guard for the Yellow Jackets that day; his great-grandfather, Kenneth Bryan, Sr., started at right guard for Vanderbilt when the Commodores knocked off Tech in 1924.

It’s naïve to think conference realignment will end anytime soon. Leagues will continue to get raided. Rivalries will continue to go dormant. Rivalry trophies will continue to get mothballed. Even the Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association, still going strong 136 years after its founding, had a member leave as recently as 2021.

Conference changes forced Georgia Tech and Vanderbilt to go their separate ways more than 60 years ago. Life and football, as ever, move on. But even with the college sports landscape changing at warp speed, their quirky traditions should still be celebrated.

“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.

What will college football look like 100 years from now? It’s impossible to say. But somewhere in Atlanta, if only faintly, we hope a silver cowbell keeps clanging.