Before there was a Floyd of Rosedale Trophy, given annually to the winner of the Iowa-Minnesota college football game, there was a live, snorting prize hog called Floyd of Rosedale, named for the governor of Minnesota and the Iowa farm where the animal once lived.

As the University of Iowa president emeritus Willard Lee Boyd recalled last week, the live Floyd was bigger than the bronze one depicted on the trophy — which is about 21 inches long and 15 ½ inches high — and smaller than the genetically engineered monster hogs of today.

And Boyd would know. Now 83, Boyd, known as Sandy, saw Floyd for the first time as an 8-year-old in 1935, when Gov. Clyde Herring of Iowa paid off a wager by delivering the Hampshire pig to the Minnesota state capitol in St. Paul. Boyd recalls visiting Floyd at the University of Minnesota’s school of agriculture, where his father, also named Willard, was a professor.

“It was still a great moment in my life,” Boyd, an Iowa law professor, said in a telephone interview from Iowa City.