There is a flag somewhere in Louisiana, divided down the middle, with LSU‘s colors on one side and Tulane‘s on the other and the state seal stitched in between. It used to go to whoever won the most important football game in the state. It has not been handed to anyone since 2009, because the game that decided it is no longer played.
This is the Battle for the Rag, and it is the strangest kind of rivalry: a dead one. For most of a century, LSU and Tulane staged one of the fiercest rivalries in the South, a game old timers once mentioned in the same breath as Alabama and Auburn. Then the two schools drifted into different universes, the games turned into routs, and eventually one side simply paid the other to stop. The Rag went into storage, and that is more or less where the rivalry has stayed.
It started, the way a lot of things in Louisiana football start, with a fight.
Table of Contents
- Louisiana’s First Game
- The Riot and the Rag
- The Night Tulane Stole the Tiger
- How LSU Pulled Away
- The Seven Hundred Thousand Dollar Goodbye
- What’s Left
- How Fans Are Fueling Two Programs That No Longer Meet
- Why It Won’t Come Back
Louisiana’s First Game
When LSU and Tulane lined up in New Orleans in November 1893, it was the first intercollegiate football game ever played in the state of Louisiana. Tulane won it 34–0. That afternoon started a series that would run, nearly every year, for more than a century, and for a long stretch of it the hatred was genuine.
The two schools spent decades as conference mates, moving together through the old Southern leagues and becoming charter members of the Southeastern Conference in 1932. In the early years, an LSU quarterback could say without exaggeration that Tulane was the one game you simply had to win. For a long time, in this state, it was the only game that truly mattered, and the venom in it ran as deep as anything in the South.
The Riot and the Rag
The rivalry got its trophy the way these things sometimes happen: out of violence. In 1938, with Tulane on its way to a win, a late hit broke the ankle of a Tulane star early in the game, and from there the afternoon turned vicious. It ended in a fistfight between the teams on the field and a full brawl between the fan bases afterward. The game is remembered less for the score than for the riot.
So in 1940, in an effort to cool things down and promote a little sportsmanship, the two schools created a flag. They called it the Rag, after the Tiger Rag tune LSU’s band played, and awarded it to the winner each year: a satin banner split between the two schools with the Louisiana state seal in the middle. The original burned up in a 1982 fire at Tulane and was rebuilt in 2001 from old photographs, which means the Rag that exists today, like the rivalry it stands for, is a careful copy of something that is mostly gone.
The Night Tulane Stole the Tiger
The best story in the whole rivalry has nothing to do with a final score. On the eve of the 1950 game, three Tulane students spotted a trailer parked outside a New Orleans restaurant with a 500 pound live tiger inside it. The tiger was Mike, LSU’s mascot, on his way to the game. The students unhitched the trailer, chained it to their Plymouth, and drove off with him. When a suspicious police officer pulled them over, they talked their way out of it by explaining, more or less truthfully, that they were escorting a tiger to the stadium.
They got Mike back to a crowd gathered on Tulane’s campus in the small hours of the morning. Some students wanted to paint him green for the Green Wave, but the thieves had no intention of hurting the animal, and the dean of students quietly arranged to move him somewhere safe. By sunrise the radio was carrying reports of a tiger abduction, and LSU was pleading with the kidnappers not to feed him, because Mike was on a special diet. The students were caught, never charged, and banned from LSU’s campus for life. The game itself ended in a 14–14 tie. To this day, Mike the Tiger does not travel to road games, and the 1950 heist is the reason.
How LSU Pulled Away
What finally killed the rivalry was not a brawl but a parting of ways. Tulane left the SEC in 1966 and steadily stepped back from big time football, choosing a different path for a private university with national academic ambitions. LSU went the opposite direction entirely, growing into one of the giants of the sport.
The games stopped being close, and then they stopped being competitive at all. LSU won the last eighteen meetings in a row, a streak that began in 1983 and simply never ended, and the Tigers piled up the kind of scores no rivalry survives, including a 62–0 wipeout. By the time the series ran out, LSU led it 69–22–7, and Tulane had not beaten the Tigers since 1982. A rivalry needs two teams that can believably beat each other, and that had quietly stopped being true.
The Seven Hundred Thousand Dollar Goodbye
The rivalry got one last try. In 2006 the schools agreed to renew it as a series that alternated cities over ten years. They made it four games. After the 2009 meeting, LSU paid Tulane seven hundred thousand dollars to cancel the rest, because it wanted the remaining games moved to Baton Rouge instead of splitting them with New Orleans. LSU’s athletic director said plainly that playing in New Orleans made no financial sense for the school. Tulane, unwilling to give up its home dates for nothing, took the money and ended the series.
The two sides agreed, as a parting gesture, to play one future game in New Orleans someday. LSU has never scheduled it, and by all appearances never will. The last Battle for the Rag, in 2009, ended 42–0.
What’s Left
The football rivalry is, for every practical purpose, dead. But the two schools never entirely stopped meeting. They still play baseball, where the series runs deeper and the games stay closer, most recently in the spring of 2026. And the football rivalry flickered with meaning one final time in 2007, two years after Hurricane Katrina, when the teams met in the Superdome and LSU wore special uniforms to honor the storm’s victims, a reminder that the two programs share a state and a history even when they no longer share much else.
Mostly, though, the Rag sits in storage, a rebuilt flag for a game nobody is playing. LSU long ago stopped needing a single archrival and settled comfortably into disliking everyone it plays. Tulane built a different kind of program in a different conference in a different city. The first game ever played in Louisiana has become the one the state mostly forgot.
How Fans Are Fueling Two Programs That No Longer Meet
The teams may not line up against each other anymore, but the fan bases have not gone anywhere.
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. Both Louisiana programs have a home there: Tigers fans gather at LSU and Green Wave fans at Tulane.
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. The Rag may be retired, but the question of whose fans show up hardest is one these two can still settle, even if they never meet on a field again.
Why It Won’t Come Back
Some rivalries go dormant and come back. This one probably will not. What killed it was not a scheduling quirk or a conference shuffle that might reverse itself in a few years. It was a deeper divergence: two schools that began in the very same place in 1893 and grew into completely different institutions, one a national football power that fills a hundred thousand seats on a Saturday night, the other a private university that decided long ago its priorities lay somewhere other than the top of college football.
The hatred that once rivaled Alabama and Auburn needed two teams that could trade wins. That has not been the case for a very long time. What remains is a shared origin, a flag in a drawer, a tiger that still refuses to travel, and a promised game in New Orleans that both sides quietly understand will never be played. In a state that loves its football as much as any in the country, the oldest rivalry it has is the one nobody is fighting over anymore.
