COAL BOWL -- WVU & Marshall -

Photo provided by Webmaster Steve. This trophy was made in West Virginia by West Virginia craftsmen.

In this game - the state is a winner! WVU and Marshall continue to play this series. This year the game is at the Milan Puskar Stadium a more beautiful stadium doesn't exist. Click here: Mountaineer Field at Milan Puskar Stadium - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia .

Webmaster Steve provided the following information about COAL BOWL.

The Friends of Coal Bowl is an annual college football game played between the West Virginia University Mountaineers and the Marshall University Thundering Herd. The game is sponsored by the Friends of Coal, a coal industry trade group. Planned to be a seven year series, the Friends of Coal Bowl was organized by the West Virginia Coal Association at the urging of West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin.
The first game of the series was played in Morgantown, West Virginia at Mountaineer Field on September 2, 2006 and was won by the Mountaineers 42-10. The location for the game will alternate every year between Morgantown and Huntington, West Virginia where Marshall plays at Joan C. Edwards Stadium.
The trophy awarded to the winning team is called the Governor's Cup. It will be presented by the West Virginia Governor and housed at the university which wins the annual matchup. Made completely in West Virginia, the trophy is made of a carbon base, a glass pedestal, and football-shaped piece of coal enclosed in glass. It was designed by Rick Mogielski.

Fenton Glass website has the following information about this trophy.

Note: Trophy was made by Dave Fetty & Co. of FENTON GLASS

The football’s glass casing and pedestal were done by Fenton Art Glass of Williamstown. The coal was supplied by Kingstown Mining Inc. near Scarbro, but wasn’t ready to work with.“I gave it to Rick and it turned out it had too much moisture in it, as it was naturally delivered to us,” said Bill Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Association. “We had to take it, pulverize it at SGS Minerals in Charleston. They pulverized it, put it in the oven and dried it out and got it to the consistency the fellow in Ansted could work with.”That fellow was Robert Dickenson of Mountaineer Coal Creations. He liquefied the coal and inserted it through a tiny air hole in the glass, filling out the football.GrafTech in Clarksburg provided the carbon base. Casto Tile and Marble of Charleston did the face plate and mounting, and Curry Bros. Monuments of Alum Creek did the laser engraving, etching the governor’s seal in the base and the “laces” in the football.Snyder, who acknowledges “the blood pressure is going up” in the Marshall camp, offered his stamp of approval.“What we started out with, what we wanted was a very unique trophy,” Snyder said. “We wanted something that would catch peoples’ eye when it was in the trophy case, either in Huntington or in Morgantown, as it travels with the winning team over the seven-year series.“Being involved in some of these games [as an assistant at Ohio State] that involve a trophy, the Axe [Paul Bunyan’s Axe, Minnesota-Wisconsin], the Floyd of Rosedale [Iowa-Minnesota], Old Oaken Bucket [Indiana-Purdue], all the old rivalries, it’s a beautiful, beautiful thing. There’s nothing more exhilarating than picking up the trophy after the game for the winning team.