University of Hawai’i Reclaims the Paniolo Trophy, November 2025
Photo courtesy Hawai’i Sports Radio
Every November, two football teams separated by 3,300 miles play for a trophy shaped like a Hawaiian cowboy. The University of Hawai’i Rainbow Warriors and the University of Wyoming Cowboys have competed for the Paniolo Trophy for over four decades, connecting Hawai’i’s ranching heritage to a football rivalry most fans elsewhere have never heard of.
A SHARED HERITAGE
Hawai’i and Wyoming first met on the football field on November 18, 1978, with the Rainbow Warriors winning 27-22 in Honolulu. The following year, the Wyoming Paniolo Society (a group of Hawai’i residents with roots in Wyoming) decided the new rivalry needed a prize honoring their shared cowboy heritage. They commissioned a traveling trophy: a bronze cowboy on horseback preparing to toss a lariat, and named it the Paniolo Trophy.
For nearly 20 seasons, both schools played in the Western Athletic Conference, with the Paniolo Trophy changing hands almost every year.
A MISSING TROPHY AND A SOLUTION
In 1997, Wyoming left the WAC for the newly formed Mountain West Conference, and the annual meeting stopped. Somewhere in that gap, the original bronze trophy went missing.
When Hawai’i joined the Mountain West in 2012, both athletic departments wanted to revive the series, but the search for the original trophy came up empty. PPS learned about the missing trophy and stepped in.
FROM STATUE TO TROPHY
Instead of commissioning a generic replacement, PPS tied the new trophy to its monument honoring Ikua Purdy, a very important figure in Hawai’i’s paniolo history. In 1908, Purdy, along with fellow paniolo Archie Ka’au’a and Jack Low, traveled to the Frontier Days rodeo in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Sent by Eben Low, the great-grandson of John Parker I, the three won the world steer-roping championship in first, third and sixth places. Nearly a century later, Purdy was inducted into the National Cowboy Museum’s Hall of Fame.
PPS commissioned western sculptor Fred Fellows to create a monumental bronze of Purdy roping a wild bull. The statue is 27 feet long, weighs 65 tons, and was cast at a foundry in Kalispell, Montana. To help fund the project, the Society sold 36 small-scale replicas (maquettes) of the statue to individual investors. The finished monument arrived at Kawaihae Harbor in January 2003 and was placed near Parker Ranch Center in Waimea, on Hawai’i Island, where it still stands today.
The new Paniolo Trophy is one of those maquettes. Dr. Billy Bergin, PPS founder and a University of Hawai’i regent emeritus, donated one to serve as the rivalry’s new prize — roughly 12 inches high and 20 inches long, mounted on a walnut base and engraved with the scores of every game in the series.
The new trophy made its debut when the series resumed, and it has been contested every year since.
THE NOVEMBER 2025 GAME
On November 29, 2025, Hawai’i hosted Wyoming in the regular-season finale at the Clarence T.C. Ching Athletics Complex. Hawai’i’s defense dominated, holding Wyoming to just one score, an early pick-six, while the offense answered with 27 unanswered points. Quarterback Micah Alejado threw for 289 yards and two touchdowns on 17-of-24 passing, and senior Jaheim Wilson-Jones picked off Wyoming’s quarterback for the first interception of his career.
Hawai’i won 27-7, finishing the season 8-4 (5-3 in Mountain West play) and reclaimed the Paniolo Trophy in front of a sellout crowd. Players ran to the Wyoming sideline after the final whistle to bring the trophy back to their own bench before the senior day celebrations began.
That win put Hawai’i on a one-game winning streak in the series. Wyoming still leads the all-time series 17-12, a margin built up largely during a six-game Wyoming winning streak that ran from 1993 to 2013. It’s worth noting Wyoming’s own game notes, published just before this year’s matchup, cited a slightly different figure (17-10) for wins specific to the Paniolo Trophy era, since the trophy wasn’t introduced until the season after the teams’ first meeting.
THE NEXT TRIP TO LARAMIE
The two teams are scheduled to meet again on September 26, 2026, in Laramie. When they do, the trophy at stake will still be the maquette of the Ikua Purdy statue standing in Waimea.
