In 1959, a Cortland football captain pulled over at a yard sale in upstate New York and bought a jug for two dollars. He and his counterpart at Ithaca painted it in both schools’ colors, and ever since, the winner of the game between these two small colleges has carried it home. More than sixty years later, that two dollar jug is the prize in one of the largest small college football games in the country, a game that sells out stadiums, fills MetLife and Yankee Stadium, and sets Division III attendance records that may never fall.
They call it the Cortaca Jug, and they bill it, accurately, as the biggest little game in the nation. SUNY Cortland and Ithaca College sit just 21 miles apart in the Finger Lakes region of New York, two Division III programs with no athletic scholarships and no national television empire, and somehow they have built a rivalry that draws hundreds of alumni to bars in Los Angeles and Manhattan every November and packs the House That Ruth Built. It is proof that the size of a rivalry has very little to do with the size of the schools.
Table of Contents
- Twenty One Miles Apart
- The Two Dollar Jug
- The Biggest Little Game in the Nation
- A Rivalry With Outposts
- When It Boiled Over
- How Fans Are Fueling This Rivalry Off the Field
- Why It Endures
Twenty One Miles Apart
Cortland and Ithaca first played in 1930, a 12–0 Cortland win, and they have been at it ever since. The two campuses sit at the eastern end of the Finger Lakes, close enough that a fan can drive from one student section to the other in well under an hour. Cortland, a public school, fields the Red Dragons. Ithaca, private, fields the Bombers. Both take their football seriously in a way that belies the division they play in: Ithaca has won three national championships and once reached a record seven Division III title games, while Cortland has stacked up playoff runs and bowl appearances of its own for decades.
Across 83 meetings, the series has stayed close enough to keep both sides honest. Ithaca leads it 44–36–3, and leads the trophy era, dating to the jug’s arrival in 1959, by a 39–27 margin. Neither number has ever grown into the kind of gap that drains a rivalry of its tension. The lead has tended to change hands in long runs rather than steady trades: Ithaca did not lose a home Cortaca Jug from 1969 through 1995, and Cortland answered decades later by winning seven straight from 2010 to 2016, a streak that included a last second victory in 2014 so dramatic it opened that night’s SportsCenter and landed on ESPN’s list of the top college football plays of the year. In a state full of much larger programs, these two have always been each other’s biggest game.
The Two Dollar Jug
The trophy is the rivalry in miniature: improvised, homemade, and beloved out of all proportion to its value. In 1959 the two team captains decided the game needed a prize. Cortland’s Tom Decker found one while driving through nearby Homer, stopping at a yard sale run by a local farmer named Freddy Moss and buying a ceramic milk jug for two dollars. He brought it to Ithaca’s Dick Carmean, and together they painted it in the colors of both schools, blue and gold for Ithaca, red and white for Cortland.
That jug has been passed back and forth every year since, with each result painted onto its surface. Eventually it filled up. By the middle of the 1980s there was no room left for new scores, so a second jug joined the first. After 2015, the second one was full too, and the schools moved on to a third. Three jugs now hold more than six decades of results, which is its own kind of monument. The name is just as plain and just as perfect: take the “Cort” from Cortland and the “aca” from Ithaca, and you have Cortaca.
The Biggest Little Game in the Nation
The label is not a marketing invention. The rivalry earned it in 1991, when a Sports Illustrated writer named John Walters used the phrase to tease the coming Ithaca and Cortland game, and it has trailed the series ever since. For most of its life the Cortaca Jug was a packed local event, the kind of game where eight thousand fans cram into an on campus stadium and the result decides a season. Then it started outgrowing its own buildings. In 2019, as college football marked its 150th anniversary, the game moved to MetLife Stadium in the New York area and drew 45,161 fans, the largest crowd in the history of Division III football. In 2022 it went to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, producing one of the biggest Division III crowds ever recorded, and in 2026 it returns to Yankee Stadium once again.
The remarkable part is that none of this is propped up by national stakes. These are two schools that hand out no athletic scholarships, playing a game that rarely decides much beyond pride and a playoff seed. The crowds show up anyway. The 2025 edition, the 66th played for the jug, stayed true to form: a sold out home crowd of more than eight thousand watched Ithaca hold on to win 26–21, sealing it with an interception in the end zone in the final minute. The Bombers carried the jug back to South Hill, and both sides immediately turned their attention to next November in the Bronx.
A Rivalry With Outposts
What sets Cortaca apart from other small college rivalries is how far it travels. The two fan bases have built standing traditions hundreds of miles from either campus. Since 2006, Ithaca alumni in Los Angeles have gathered every year to watch the game together at an event they call CortaCal, now held at a bar in Hollywood that draws several hundred graduates. In New York City, Ithaca alumni started their own watch party, NYCortaca, in 2009. By 2013 it pulled in more than 800 people and became the largest gathering of Ithaca alumni ever held away from campus. Collectively these viewings have a name of their own, Cortaca Nation, and in 2024 they numbered a record twenty four across the United States and Canada.
Back home, the festivities start the night before. Cortland’s student radio station and Ithaca’s student station face off in their own contest, the Cortaca Mic, a tradition that lets the broadcasters settle a score of their own before the players ever take the field. For a game between two schools most of the country has never heard of, Cortaca casts an unusually long shadow.
When It Boiled Over
The rivalry’s intensity has occasionally spilled past the stadium. After Cortland won in 2013, celebrations in the streets of Cortland turned destructive, with revelers flipping cars and throwing objects, and around thirty people were arrested as state police helped restore order. The university’s president issued a public apology.
What happened next is the more telling part. Rather than let one night define the rivalry, Cortland’s student government launched a campaign the following year called Take Cortaca Back, working with the city’s mayor and local officials to rebuild the game’s reputation around community service in the days before and after kickoff. The rivalry stayed fierce while the culture around it grew up. It is now, once again, what it was always meant to be: a very big party for a very big game.
How Fans Are Fueling This Rivalry Off the Field
A rivalry this organic, built by students and alumni rather than television executives, is a natural fit for fan driven support.
In the NIL era, backing a program means more than a ticket and a voice. Platforms like RallyFuel let fans support individual athletes directly through verified, compliant NIL deals, choosing which players to fund, following their real performance stats, and turning loyalty into something measurable. That model reaches all the way down to Division III, where there are no athletic scholarships and a few hundred dollars of fan support can be the real difference in an athlete’s season. Both programs have a home there: Red Dragons fans gather at Cortland and Bombers fans at Ithaca.
RallyFuel’s Fan Power Rankings measure a fan base’s energy (fans, fire ups, Rally Pit activity, and posts), while the schools leaderboard ranks programs by total support from fans. For two fan bases that already fill Yankee Stadium and pack bars three time zones away, turning that energy into something their athletes can use feels like a natural next step.
Why It Endures
Cortaca endures because it was never built on anything fragile. It does not need a national title on the line, a blood feud, or a marketing department. It has two schools close enough to share the same back roads, a jug somebody bought for pocket change, and generations of students who carried the rivalry with them long after graduation, all the way to Hollywood and the Bronx.
The game returns to Yankee Stadium in 2026, the third jug still filling with scores, the alumni booking their flights and their barstools. The Bombers and Red Dragons will play for bragging rights and a hand painted trophy, and tens of thousands of people might show up to watch two small colleges from the Finger Lakes decide, for one more year, who gets to keep the biggest little game in the nation.
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