Rivalry games and trophies

So in the US, college and university are synonymous and interchangeable with each other.

College football has the closest thing to derbies (or at least did/ will have had before the television money ruined the sport).

So basically outside of baseball, university sports predate professional sports in the US. College football and to a lesser extent college basketball are the most important and the ones that make enough revenue to basically pay for the other sports in athletic department. So it has always been a business but the rules were based on amateurism until recent court rulings allowed the student players to earn money off their image licensing. Before those rulings, players could not be paid, but there were always shady school fundraisers called boosters that would secretly pay student athletes to play for their favorite universities.

So teams from one university would play teams from another local university. The universities with larger student enrollment basically formed conferences to compete with one another, and the mid sized universities and smaller universities did the same. It was basically large regional land grant universities playing nearby land grant universities, with occasional large private (which usually meant religious about a century ago but they mostly became secular over time) universities as well.

Players and students from the various universities grew up and played high school football together or against the players from the other local universities. There was a lot of joking and good natured pranks as a result. Students would steal trophies, statues, mascots, or other symbols of their rival schools. These would become the spoils for the winning team. Some of these trophies have names that reflect the secular/ religious, class, American Civil War divisions of the local community. Some games are still called the Civil War, the Border War, the Holy War, etc.

Many of these trophies predate any kind of college championship. So your primary goal would be to beat your rival, and then win your conference title if your team was any good. If your team had a crap season, you could salvage it by beating your rivalry game opponent and spoiling their chance of a conference title.

Eventually the conference champion of the Pacific Conference agreed to play the champion of the Big 10 conference in what was called the Rose Bowl. Then teams wanted to win enough to earn a spot in a postseason bowl game. So again if your rival could beat you in the last game of the season to upset your bowl bid, then that would make their season. During the bowl era, one loss was often enough to cost you a shot at a bowl game or a shot at a conference or national title.

The whole thing was based on playing against the same players who you played with or against in high school. It was all regional. Then the television money kept growing, and teams would leave their conference in the hopes of earning more television revenue in a different conference, but losing their centuries old rivalries in the process. Several conferences collapsed because they couldn’t stop their members from getting a bigger paycheck elsewhere. The rival games are still around for now, but many have disappeared with conference realignment.