POCATELLO and MOSCOW, Idaho -- In remote stretches of I-84 between Boise and Pocatello in southern Idaho, the speed limit is 80 mph. It wouldn't be unusual to set the cruise control to 90 and not worry about a speeding ticket. But in 2023, when Maclane Westbrook was a student at Idaho State, he blew past a state trooper sitting in the median and his speedometer read triple digits.
"I didn't even try to slow down," Westbrook said.
Westbrook was driving an ISU-issued car -- with university insignia on the side -- and was on his way back to campus from a board of educators meeting in the state capital and was quickly pulled over.
As Westbrook searched for an explanation that might possibly get him out of the ticket, a puzzled look overtook the trooper's face. Sitting on the lap of Westbrook's friend riding shotgun was a bald, silver-colored potato wearing a dry human smirk.
"You got a pottery project there?" the trooper asked.
This is how Westbrook found himself telling the story of the King Spud trophy -- a long-lost relic in the Idaho-Idaho State rivalry -- on the side of the highway, with hope its lore would inspire the trooper to issue just a warning. The tale did not have the desired outcome, and when the trooper retreated to his car to write the ticket, Westbrook's friend noticed King Spud's crown had been sitting on the floor mat. While they waited, he fixed it back on the trophy's head.
When the trooper returned, he was perplexed yet again.
"Hey, he wasn't wearing a crown when I was here the first time," he said.
For Westbrook, it was an awkward traffic stop. For King Spud, it was just another chapter in an already bizarre existence. Because sometime around 1979, long before a replica of the original trophy found itself in the front seat of an Idaho State fleet car, baffling a state trooper, the original King Spud quietly and mysteriously vanished entirely. And for decades, no one seemed to care.
Born as a quirky art project at the University of Idaho in the early 1960s, the trophy's vanishing act is one of the stranger mysteries in college sports. Over the past four decades, others have tried to track it down. This year, ESPN set out on its own adventure through Idaho's small towns and college campuses, following decades of faint clues to determine what really happened to the lost King Spud -- and whether it might still be out there.
THE QUEST BEGAN in early August at Buddy's Italian Restaurant in Pocatello, where former Idaho State sports information director Glenn Alford suggested we meet. Buddy's opened its doors in 1961, and its weathered exterior suggests the building hasn't changed much in the decades since.
Alford, 83, has been dining here since he was hired in 1967, and he was quick to recommend the spaghetti and meatballs. He seemed excited to meet with an out-of-towner embarking upon an unusual treasure hunt. A Stanford-educated historian, Alford spent 31 years as Idaho State's sports information director. No one was better to deliver a first-hand account of the trophy's place in history.
In the first half of the 20th century, Idaho-Idaho State wasn't much of a rivalry. The schools are located on opposite sides of the state, and they are separated by about a nine-hour drive that covers nearly 600 miles. Additionally, from 1922 to 1959, Idaho played in the Pacific Coast Conference with USC, UCLA, Stanford and other large West Coast universities. The two schools played only twice in football prior to 1962, but when the Big Sky Conference formed in 1963, they started playing annually, and as many as four times a year in basketball.
"Idaho got its butt kicked regularly, because what in the hell were they doing playing USC and UCLA?" Alford said. "But they took great pride in being a [Division I] school and eventually sanity reigned there and they decided that was unsustainable. So, they joined the Big Sky, and nobody in the conference liked their attitude about, 'We're more important than everybody else.'"
The Vandals remained in the Big Sky until 1996, when they left for the Big West and for two decades tried to make football work at what is now the FBS level. But the geography -- among other reasons -- didn't allow it to work. Idaho returned most of its sports to the Big Sky in 2014, and football returned to the conference in 2018, where the school again competes with more natural peers.
In 1968, Alford was preparing to hit the road for a neutral-site basketball game against Idaho in Twin Falls when he was approached by his boss.
"He says, 'You've got to take the King Spud trophy with you.' And I said, 'What is the King Spud trophy?'" Alford recalls. "I'd never seen it. Never heard of it."
The King Spud trophy was commissioned by the Moscow Chamber of Commerce in 1962 with the idea it would be awarded annually to the winner of the Idaho-Idaho State men's basketball game or series.
For at least 17 years, that's what happened, with the trophy bouncing back and forth between Moscow and Pocatello.
The state was not exactly a basketball mecca during this period, but the Bengals delivered one of the great moments in Big Sky history in 1977 when they beat UCLA in the Sweet 16 of the NCAA men's basketball tournament. The upset ended the Bruins' run of 10 consecutive trips to the Final Four and sits alongside Idaho State's 1981 Division I-AA football national title as the greatest achievement in school history.
Alford admits he didn't have an affinity for the King Spud trophy, nor did anyone else the way he remembers it. He never wrote about it in news releases, and it was something of a nuisance because of how heavy it was -- Alford estimates it weighed about 25 pounds -- making it difficult to lug around.
When Lynn Archibald arrived as the head coach after the NCAA tournament run in 1977, he also didn't care for the trophy. After losing to Idaho in 1979, he told reporters: "The trophy should go to the losing team, not the winning one. It's the ugliest thing I've ever seen. The only good thing that happened last weekend was losing it."
After that, the trophy simply drifted out of public consciousness. There was no announcement of a retirement, no news reports that it had gone missing, no campus legend about a theft. One year it existed -- lumpy, metallic, ugly enough that a coach wanted to give it to the loser -- and then it was gone.
The simplest explanation is probably the most likely, he thinks. It was left behind due to forgetfulness or even discarded.
The conversation inside Buddy's didn't lead to any strong King Spud leads, only a feeling of nostalgia for the Idaho State that lived in Alford's stories.
THE OBVIOUS PLACE to begin the physical search is Idaho State's ICCU Dome.
On a Tuesday morning, Idaho State sports information director Jon Match was waiting just a few steps from where the football team was practicing. Match was friendly and helpful, but realistic: King Spud has been missing for more than four decades, and nothing about the Dome suggests it holds many secrets. Still, he said, there are storage rooms and dusty closets in the building to sift through. If the trophy somehow survived, that would be the place to focus on searching.
We walk through the concourse -- where most of the Bengals' most treasured keepsakes are displayed in glass trophy cases -- into a room that rarely has visitors. Cardboard boxes are filled with old stuff: jerseys, pictures, 80-year-old trophies, folders and a binder labeled "bbq sauce/road trip." At the back of the room there is a hatch that leads into a dark crawl space under the bleachers -- Alford had thrown out the possibility King Spud could be in there -- but the risk/reward analysis determines it isn't worth venturing more than a few feet past the opening.
After working through a few more storage areas, it becomes clear that whatever secrets the Dome holds, none of them resemble our elusive potato.
Idaho State athletic director Pauline Thiros also seems politely amused by the search for King Spud. Thiros is from Poky, played volleyball for the Bengals and has worked in the ISU athletic department since 1995, beginning as a volleyball coach and becoming AD in 2019.
"I actually was not aware of King Spud until a couple of years before I became athletic director," she said in her office. "I heard about it with a scavenger hunt and King Spud -- if you find King Spud, you're like the grand champion. And it was really just a joke."
Thiros was disappointed when King Spud didn't turn up during a renovation project a few years ago, but a track trophy from 1917 was discovered under the bleachers.
She didn't rule out the possibility the royal russet was somewhere still on campus, but she wasn't optimistic.
"I think somebody thought it was so ugly that they tossed it," she said.
The general feeling about King Spud changed dramatically in the years after it faded into obscurity, however, and after a King Spud account was created on Twitter in 2022, a new generation of Idaho State students was introduced to the trophy in a more positive manner.
"The students became weirdly obsessed with King Spud," she said, affectionately. "They're the ones that ultimately worked with Idaho students to bring it back."
One of those students was Maclane Westbrook. He grew up in Oregon and didn't arrive in Pocatello with any sense of local tradition. He remembers King Spud as a vague image at first -- a photo he might have seen somewhere online -- until a 2021 Idaho State Journal story pulled it into focus.
During a detour from ISU as a student at College of Eastern Idaho, he noticed how little campus identity a community college can have. So when he returned to Idaho State, King Spud looked less like a joke and more like an opportunity. He got involved in student government and started pitching the idea of bringing the trophy back.
"Whenever I brought it up, I felt like I had to be careful about it," he said. "I was afraid I would just start talking about King Spud and someone [would think] I was insane. So I was trying to be careful whenever I started talking about it or telling people about it. But whenever I did, everyone was pretty enthusiastic about it. 'That's really cool.' 'That should be brought back.'"
Westbrook put together a presentation, walked into a Wednesday night student senate meeting and made his case. Everyone was all for it. When the student government in Moscow was looped in, it was equally enthusiastic.
Details about funding were relatively easy to sort through, but there was a question about how it should be awarded. Should the trophy be tied only to men's basketball, as it once was, or shared with the women's teams?
"There was also a discussion for doing a Queen Spud trophy, which I thought would've been the coolest thing to do," Westbrook said. "Have a King Spud and a Queen Spud. And then the goal is to try to win them both, so you can unite the monarchy of the spud."
In the end, simplicity won out. King Spud would be a combined competition involving all four annual men's and women's basketball games. If either school won at least three of the four games, it kept the trophy for the year. If the series ended 2-2, the tiebreaker would be total point differential.
In the first season of the reboot in 2023, the tiebreaker was in play as the Idaho State women's team needed to win or lose by seven points or fewer. The Bengals trailed by 21 at halftime but had cut the deficit to 8 with 1:17 left. At this point, Thiros' rooting interest shifted from the game to what equated to a point spread.
She was watching on television as the final seconds ticked down.
"I am no longer thinking we need to win this game," Thiros said. "I'm thinking we have to score a basket."
A late jumper cut the deficit to six, ensuring King Spud would spend the next year in Pocatello.
"After the game, I'm congratulating Coach [Seton Sobolewski]," Thiros said. "I'm like, 'Yeah, I know we wanted the W, but hey, you got it, you're bringing home King Spud.' And he was like, 'What are you talking about?' He was still pissed about the loss.
"He didn't care about King Spud the first time. He cares now. It was hilarious."
Idaho State also won the most recent series for the 2024-25 school year, so a visit to the student union -- where the new King Spud is displayed -- was also in order. School wasn't in session, so the building was empty. On the second floor, in a vertical glass case, sat the modern King Spud.
It was ... underwhelming. For all the enthusiasm students had poured into resurrecting the tradition, the display didn't fully capture that energy. There was no plaque, no sign explaining its history or its odd place in the Idaho-Idaho State rivalry. Just a strange, side-eyed silver potato wearing a gold crown, looking vaguely annoyed to be sitting alone in an empty student union.
The last stop in Pocatello was a pawn shop about 7 miles away on the edge of town. "Pawn Stars" has tricked me into believing this is exactly the sort of place where miraculous discoveries happen. The cinderblock building with barred windows sat alone behind a patch of gravel. Inside, I approached a man with a dolly and asked if he was the proprietor.
"Depends on what you're selling," he said.
I gave him the quick King Spud spiel and he also had never heard of it. That was that, and I left Pocatello no closer to finding the original King Spud than when the journey started.
WITHOUT ANY LUCK in Pocatello, the quest moved north to Moscow. If there is one building in the country that might be hiding a 60-year-old potato in some forgotten corner, maybe it would be the state's other dome. The Kibbie Dome.
For decades, the building has been a personal curiosity -- part football stadium, part indoor track, part architectural experiment, part fever dream. Assistant athletic director Jerek Wolcott weaved us through halls that felt more like the underbelly of a ship than the guts of a stadium. He unlocked a cement-walled room tucked behind one of the end zones. Dust coated everything. Cardboard boxes were filled with trophies dating back to the 1930s. No spud.
We climb a hidden set of stairs and a ladder into the rafters, where we can peer through the slats in the roof onto the field below. There is, of course, no logical reason King Spud would be here, but common sense has long been lost. And the view of the Palouse from the roof ends up being worth the climb.
With no luck inside the Kibbie Dome, the next logical step was to meet with the person who helped resurrect King Spud in the first place.
Casey Doyle is a professor of art and design at the University of Idaho, and during a quiet summer a few years ago someone from the library approached him with an unusual request: Could he re-create a long-lost potato-shaped rivalry trophy so the school could display it in the library?
The project was outside his normal artistic lane. He's not a sports fan, and Doyle's background blends traditional sculpture with performance-based work and nontraditional materials, but the idea of re-creating a decades-old trophy born from student folklore was interesting enough for him to take it on.
Doyle began with the few photographs that exist of the original King Spud. Working in clay made the most sense given the budget and his expertise. He blocked out a solid clay potato first, shaping its rounded form, then gradually carved in the signature elements: the smirking face, the rounded head, the base beneath it and the simple crown that once sat atop the original.
Once the exterior form looked right, he cut the sculpture cleanly down the middle and hollowed it out so it wouldn't explode during firing. The base was thrown separately on a pottery wheel. After firing, it became the new physical reference point for the trophy's rebirth.
The library then had Doyle's sculpture 3D-scanned so it could produce small replica keychains. Doyle assumed that was the extent of its use. Until we met in the library a few feet from where his clay version is on display. Doyle had no idea it had also been 3D printed to be put back in circulation as a rivalry trophy.
By this point, the mission had shifted. Finding the original King Spud felt unlikely; understanding its lore was essential. And in Moscow, there was only one place to go for that -- the Corner Club, the town's legendary sports bar.
In the middle of a weekday afternoon, the place was empty. Marc Trivelpiece, the owner since 2007, stood behind the bar wiping down glasses. One of the King Spud keychains is on display and another depiction of the trophy is on the wall.
Trivelpiece didn't need much prompting to dive into the mystery. His theory about the missing trophy mirrored the most common one: Someone tossed it decades ago.
"Where else would it have gone?" he asked. "We've been looking for it for years -- at least we have. I don't know how much effort Idaho State put into looking for it.
"It could have been somebody took it home and then it got put in the back of a closet and they passed away and their kids didn't know what it was. They got rid of it. Who knows."
At Corner Club, the lore of King Spud lived on. And maybe that would have to be enough.
A HANDFUL OF follow-up calls after the Idaho quest didn't uncover anything new. At some point, the odyssey stopped being about finding a missing object and became a question about why anyone would care this much about a decades-old potato trophy in the first place.
Maybe the answer is simple: Rivalry trophies are fun. Even the clothing company Homefield Apparel has embraced the lore, selling a King Spud T-shirt. Trophies can be quirky, tangible excuses for schools to argue about bragging rights, to tell old stories, to let a football game or basketball series feel like it carries just a little more weight than the standings say it does.
That became clearer when Idaho State revived not just King Spud, but a trophy it didn't even know it had lost. In the wake of King Spud's resurrection, Thiros asked Westbrook if he had any other ideas in the spirit of King Spud.
"Well, there's the Train Bell Trophy. It's down at Weber State collecting dust," he said.
The bell wasn't missing so much as forgotten, tucked away somewhere at Weber State since it was last awarded in 1973.
"So for two years we kind of had discussions with Weber State about, let's bring back the Train Bell," Thiros said.
Finally, Idaho State stopped waiting. The school announced unilaterally that the Train Bell Trophy was returning, and when the Bengals won in Ogden, Utah, for the first time in 40 years, the offensive line lugged the heavy bell to a roaring ISU student section.
The same pattern repeated itself in the Idaho-Idaho State football rivalry. Since 2018, the schools had played for the Battle of the Domes Trophy, but a corporate sponsorship change led to its quiet retirement after the 2022 season. Suddenly, football had no symbol at all.
For the 2023 meeting, then-Idaho head coach Jason Eck refused to let the game go trophy-less. He cobbled together a temporary Potato State Trophy by attaching a Mr. Potato Head to the Battle of the Domes base. It was goofy and earnest.
Last year, Wolcott created a permanent fix. He carved the official Potato State Trophy out of north Idaho Douglas fir, a straightforward, sturdy replacement for a rivalry that has never taken itself too seriously. Idaho won last year, but on Saturday the Bengals beat the Vandals 37-16 to claim the trophy, uniting it with King Spud for the first time.
The original King Spud remains missing -- maybe in a landfill, maybe truly gone. If anything, the hunt for something lost ended up bringing more traditions back into the light. Rivalry trophies survive not because they endure, but because people keep deciding they still matter.