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The History: Bell games dates back to railroad days
It's not simply duration that makes a rivalry great. The best college feuds are balanced, back and forth battles, sustained by a blur of hatred and respect between the two student bodies.
There have to be enough big moments to fuel the fire and anecdotes to stoke the flames.
The fire of DePauw-Wabash rivalry was fueled, quite literally, by coal. It was like most things in the late 1800s.
The Monon Railroad owned tracks that ran from Chicago to Indianapolis and from Michigan City to Louisville. It wasn't a large company, but it connected the Midwest. There weren't automobiles and there weren't key waterways like in other areas of the country.
If freight, or people, were getting moved through Indiana, they were getting moved on the Monon.
Former DePauw student and amateur railroad historian Garth McMains described the company's importance.
"Monon was an interesting railroad," McMains said. "It was basically the railroad of Indiana and the railroad of the colleges of Indiana."
Much of the freight cargo was coal, brought up from southern Indiana to Indy and Chicago. Monon also bridged other railroads.
A railroad owns not just the engine, but also the track. To get cargo from Milwaukee to Nashville, one company would bring it from Milwaukee to Chicago, then pay Monon to take it from Chicago to Louisville where another railroad would then bring it the rest of the way.
Bridge traffic was a big part of the Monon cargo, as was coal. So, too, were passengers. While the route is down to just once per day now, at its peak as many as 20 trains per day traveled through Bloomington (Indiana University), Greencastle (DePauw), Crawfordsville (Wabash) and Lafayette (Purdue).
"They were kind of the link between IU, DePauw, Wabash, Purdue, all that," McMains said. "A lot of their ridership for their passenger train was college students."
For much of the Monon's history the locomotive was driven by a mammoth steam engine, fueled by coal and hauling thousands of tons. The boiler for the engine provided steam for the train whistle, but supplementing that was a huge 300 pound iron bell.
Like most of the materials on the train, the bell was, and remains, nearly indestructible.
"Everything was made of basically the most top-notch materials back then so you had sheer weight in everything," McMains said.
To show its appreciation to the college students who had been some of its primary passengers for the prior few decades, Monon donated the bell of a decommissioned steam engine to the DePauw-Wabash football winner in 1932.
The railroad's role in the Monon Bell Classic is fitting since there is no more fitting metaphor for football than that of a powerful, precise train.
Prior to the bell being introduced, Wabash held a 19-16-3 advantage over DePauw in the football rivalry, which included a few years where the teams played twice and one, in 1904, when DePauw refused to play.
Integration plays a large, but mostly misunderstood, part of this rivalry. There are still jokes about Wabash being an all-boys school and while it has integrated genders that wasn't always the case.
DePauw became co-educational in 1867, but that should not be taken as a sign the school was for universal equality. In "The Monon Bell Rivalry: Classic Clashes of DePauw vs. Wabash," author Tyler G. James describes the scene before the 1903 game when the Wabash roster included an African-American player.
The Tigers refused to come out of the locker room. They eventually did, and lost, but the following year when Wabash had another black player DPU cancelled the game.
Both schools are fully integrated now, but the dissonance between gender and racial integration from the two schools is notable.
As time progressed the rivalry grew to mean more than just a football game and, as DPU head coach Bill Lynch describes it, "Monon Bell is part of the fabric of both institutions."
"I've known about it forever," Lynch said of the rivalry, "because when I played at Butler we were in the same conference with Wabash and DePauw. We all knew ... that they played the Bell game at the end, so no matter how the conference went, that was like their conference championship."
The history of Monon includes several instances of kids stealing the bell from the other institution. Some are funny stories, described quite well in "The Monon ...." None will be detailed in this space, and almost all of them were Wallies stealing the bell from Dannies.
The basic theme of all the crime and pranks is this: DePauw students spend their time enjoying life, hanging out with members of the opposite sex and avoiding prolonged bouts of frustration.
Wabash students spend their time being bitter, frustrated and searching for deviant fun and pranks. There aren't girls around, so they have to entertain themselves in other, more creative ways. That usually involves hiding and phony identities but sometimes involve bats and broken bottles.
College kids who aren't making out with randoms on Thursday nights do the craziest things.
As the game has moved closer to the present day and into the current decade, it has become more and more clear that in the grand scheme, the Monon Bell Classic is a game of runs.
Only five times in the 119-game history has there been four consecutive season where the bell changed hands. In just those five cases, a particular graduating class from both schools has never retained it.
One team tends to be better than the other for long stretches.
For the past four years, that school has been Wabash.
No one on the DePauw roster has beaten Wabash. Only a few have ever played on the same team as someone who has beaten Wabash.
History suggests it will change soon. The longest winning streak by either school is seven, and prior to the current four-game stretch, the series record was 53-53-9.
While it seems unlikely that DePauw, sitting in the middle of the conference pack, will break it's skid this year against 8-1 Wabash, a large crowd and national television audience will be watching to find out.
Streaks grow the hype. Upsets grow the history.