State Of Michigan Trophy

Season:
 
Sport:
Back in September 2003, Pontiac started 'The Pontiac Challenge', to track the head-to-head competition between the University of Michigan and Michigan State University for the whole school year. They divided the school year up into 3 sessions (Fall, Winter, and Spring), and awarded a trophy to the winner of each session, with the current winner keeping it in the case of a tie.

Not too surprisingly, UM won (or tied) every session for all 3 years that Pontiac sponsored the Challenge (2003-2004, 2004-2005, and 2005-2006). Also not too surprisingly, Pontiac lost interest when the Challenge got too one-sided. So, after the 2005-2006 season, they dropped it, but I picked it up. However, I thought their setup with the 3 sessions and a goofy scoring system could be improved, so I changed it to a single session (the whole school year), with 2 points for each win, and 1 point for each tie.

From 2006-2010, I used Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to track the results. I used the built-in spreadsheet-to-HTML converter in Excel to generate the Web pages, which I then had to upload to my Web site. It was clumsy, to say the least, so I wrote a PHP script, with some Javascript, to use MySQL to generate the Web pages 'on demand'. I also entered all the old data for the seasons going back to 2000-2001, which is as far back as I can find reliable information.

A quick look at the 'Season: Summary/Sport: All' page will show that UM has won the State of Michigan Trophy every year for the last 26 years except twice (2009-2010 and 2023-2024).

Date Sport Venue Score Points Comments Article
UM MSU UM MSU UM MSU
09/18/2026 (W) Field Hockey East Lansing 2 1 2 0   Michigan Edges Michigan State in Big Ten Opener Michigan State Pushes #13 Michigan to the Wire in 2-1 Conference Opener
09/20/2026 (W) Soccer East Lansing 3 1 2 0   Jablinskey Brace Fuels U-M Upset of No. 1 Michigan State Spartans Suffer First Loss of 2026, Fall to Michigan 3-1
11/07/2026 (M) Football Ann Arbor              
11/13/2026 (M) Soccer East Lansing              
11/17/2026 (W) Volleyball East Lansing              
11/20/2026 (M) Hockey Ann Arbor              
11/21/2026 (M) Hockey East Lansing              
12/29/2026 (W) Basketball Ann Arbor              
02/05/2027 (M) Hockey East Lansing              
02/06/2027 (M) Hockey TBD              
02/13/2027 (M) Basketball Ann Arbor              
02/26/2027 (M) Basketball East Lansing              
02/28/2027 (W) Basketball East Lansing              
Total   4 0  

Record UM MSU
Home 0-0-0 (0.000) 0-2-0 (0.000)
Away 2-0-0 (1.000) 0-0-0 (0.000)
Neutral 0-0-0 (0.000) 0-0-0 (0.000)
Total 2-0-0 (1.000) 0-2-0 (0.000)

Please send any updates or corrections to Drew Montag (drew@montag.org)

Script last modified: Monday 08/10/2026 21:37:55 EDT

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