Round collegiate button with black, yellow and gray stripes and "Army" printed in black in the center of the button. There are three ribbons (black, yellow, and white) attached to the bottom of the button and a goldtone metal football hangs from another yellow ribbon. The United States Military Academy has had a football program since 1890 with three National Chamionships (1944, 45, 46) and three Heisman Trophy winners (Doc Blanchard 1945, Glenn Davis 1946 and Pete Dawkins 1958). The Army Black Knights are located in West Point, New York. Army General Douglas MacArthur is attributed with saying, "Upon the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that upon other fields, on other days, will bear the fruits of victory," in reference to football preparing men for struggles.
This round pinback button was made for supporters of the University of Alabama. The button is white with red text that says, “University of Alabama” and a red “Sailor Elephant” logo. The “sailor elephant” is an example of logos made popular after World War II, where common collegiate mascots were recreated with a sailor hat. Common examples of these “sailor” mascot logos include versions of the University of North Carolina ram, the Baylor bear, the Auburn tiger and the Oregon duck, among others. Most of the mascots are attributed to Arthur Evans, the head artist at Angelus Pacific Co. of Fullerton, California. Evans was a prolific graphic artist and former Disney employee.
The University of Alabama athletics are most known for their success in collegiate football. The Alabama football team was founded in 1892 and the team has been officially known as the “Crimson Tide” ever since the phrase was used by Hugh Roberts, a sports editor at the Birmingham Age-Herald. Roberts used the term to describe the Alabama football team after their match against Auburn in 1907. The excellent play by the Alabama line defined the match and while the team had previously been referred to as the “Thin Red Line,” Roberts chose to describe this new unite as a “Crimson Tide” that went through or over the opposing team.
Since that time, the team has also become associated with their elephant mascot, who, in modern times is portrayed by a character known as Big Al. There are two stories of how the elephant became associated with the Crimson Tide. The first is that a local luggage manufacturer provided the 1927 team with custom luggage for their trip to the 1928 Rose Bowl. The company's logo was a red elephant which journalist Grantland Rice compared to the team's size. The second story is attributed to a 1930 quote from Georgia Tech Hall of Famer and Atlanta Journal staff writer, Everett Strupper, who said:
"At the end of the quarter, the earth started to tremble, there was a distant rumble that continued to grow. Some excited fan in the stands bellowed, 'Hold your horses, the elephants are coming,' and out stamped this Alabama varsity. It was the first time that I had seen it and the size of the entire eleven nearly knocked me cold, men that I had seen play last year looking like they had nearly doubled in size."
The 1930 team that Strupper described in his quote would go on to a 10-0 record, outscoring opponents 217-13. Alabama would meet Washington State in the Rose Bowl that year and defeat them 24-0 on their way to being declared National Champions. Regardless, the elephant was a common fixture in Alabama athletic tradition by 1940. This, at one point, included the presence of Alamite, a live elephant mascot, who would appear on the sidelines of home games and at homecoming parades.
Round collegiate button is red with a white stripe that has text saying "Fordham" in red lettering at the center of the button. Fordham University is a Jesuit institution in New York with a long athletic history. The school began a football program in 1882 and has made appearances in both the Cotton Bowl (loss to Texas A&M in 1941) and the Sugar Bowl (win against Missouri in 1942), two of collegiate football’s most prestigious bowl games.
While the team currently plays in the lower part of Division One in the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS), they originally played at the highest level of competition. The football team's most notable mark on history occurred on September 30, 1939 when Fordham played the Waynesburg Yellow Jackets. The game is the first televised American football game. Broadcast by NBC, Fordham would win 34-7. With 9,000 people in attendance the game reached an estimated 1,000 television sets. The game occurred five months after the Princeton v. Columbia baseball game which was the first televised sporting event.
The Fordham football team has a long history of success; however its most successful era was the late 1920s through the 1930s. During this time, Fordham was routinely ranked as one of the best teams in the country. Fordham was led by “Sleepy” Jim Crowley, who was one of Notre Dame’s legendary Four Horsemen. Crowley would hire Frank Leahy to be his offensive line coach, who would later go on to become the head coach at Notre Dame and compile a career coaching record of 107-13-9. While Crowley and Leahy would be the people responsible for Fordham’s success from the sidelines, the offensive line would become credited with Fordham’s success on the field.
The offensive line was an extraordinarily powerful unit for the Rams throughout this early period; however the most recognizable of these groups would be the team from 1936. This group was recognized as crucial to the team reaching its lofty goals of a Rose Bowl appearance. To capitalize on this, Fordham’s publicist, Timothy Cohane began to work on creating a nickname to promote the team. Originally he would propose the nickname of the “Seven Samsons” to describe the seven men that made up the offensive line. However, the name would not catch on leading him to try for a catchier title. Later, using inspiration from Grantland Rice, Cohane would describe the unit as the “Seven Blocks of Granite.” The name stuck and the Seven Blocks of Granite are a key part of college football history. The most famous members of the Seven Blocks of Granite include Leo Paquin, Johnny Druze, Alex Wojciechowicz, Ed Franco, Al Babartsky, Natty Pierce and, most notably, Vince Lombardi.
Fordham’s importance continues to resonate in modern football. The Rotary Club’s Lombardi Award is awarded annually, since 1970, to the nation’s best collegiate lineman or linebacker. To honor the award’s namesake, Vince Lombardi, and his days at Fordham, the trophy is a block of granite. At the professional level of football, the St. Louis Rams got their mascot from the Fordham Rams. St. Louis traces its roots to Cleveland where the team was founded in 1936. When selecting a nickname for the team, ownership decided to go with the Rams to honor the players that came out of Fordham University.
Round collegiate button has red, yellow, and white stripes with "V. M. I." in red lettering in the center of the button. The Virginia Military Institure Keydets played their first college football season in 1891. The team is represented by their mascot, Moe the Kangaroo, who was originally known as TD Bound. VMI is also unique in that it requires every student to attend games from beginning to end. The team has featured in several small, regular season bowl games (the Tobacco Bowl and Oyster Bowl) that feature teams from Virginia and Carolina area. The most notable modern mark of V.M.I. football is their rivalry against The Citadel, which is known as the Military Classic of the South.
This a pinback button representing the “Chinese Bandits” defense for LSU college football. The button is gold with purple lettering saying, “Chinese Bandits” and purple Chinese characters. Ever since 1958, the Louisiana State University Tigers’ defense has been referred to as the Chinese Bandits. The name came from the team’s head coach, Paul Dietzel, who used the term to describe the team’s ferociousness and recklessness. Dietzel likely would have gotten the term “Chinese Bandits” from the popular comic strip at the time, “Terry and the Pirates.” In the comic strips, the main character, Terry Lee, is often depicted facing off against Chinese pirates and their leader, the Dragon Lady. At LSU, the Chinese Bandits nickname was originally used to describe the team’s third string defense. Due to substation rules at the time, teams were usually organized into platoons. The first team was known as the “White team,” the second team as the “Go team” and the third as the “Chinese Bandits.” The third string became such a force in LSU’s 1958 campaign that they were covered by articles in Sports Illustrated (November 17, 1958) and Life (October 12, 1959). The team would go on to win LSU’s first National Title.
This group was so influential that modern defenses are still referred to as the Chinese Bandits celebrated by the LSU band playing “Chinese Bandits” (the song is also called, “Tiger Bandits) and fans bowing down to them. Dietzel would leave LSU to become the head coach at Army where the Chinese Bandits theme would follow him. Army’s chief rival at the time was Navy who was led by an unusually audacious coach named Wayne Hardin. Hardin would modify Navy’s jerseys (long before it was common) in preparation for the annual game against Army. While most of these modifications were meant to taunt Army in general, a few of Hardin’s designs were meant as digs at Dietzel. This included one season when Hardin had pirate flags placed on the front of Navy’s helmets and Chinese characters on the sides of the helmet that translated to “Beat Army,” a way of challenging the strength of Dietzel’s Chinese Bandit reputation.
This is a round collegiate pinback button that is maroon with gold lettering in the center of the button, saying University of Minnesota Indian Homecoming, 1928.
The Minnesota Golden Gopher's 1928 homecoming game was against the Chicago Maroons, another member of the Big Ten conference, held on October 20, 1928 at Memorial Stadium in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Minnesota would win the game, 33-7.
Memorial Stadium, also known as the Brick House, was home to Minnesota football from 1924 to 1981. The Gophers won six National Championships, including three consecutively (1934-36,) while playing at Memorial .Although the stadium was demolished in 1992, the original entrance to the stadium is now located inside the McNamara Alumni Center on campus. The final score of the 1928 homecoming game was a 33-7 victory for Minnesota.
This game in 1928 was known as "Indian Homecoming because that year's Homecoming was given a Native American theme ( aach year, the homecoming game was given a theme for students and alumni to partake in.) For the 1928 Indian Homecoming, stereotypical items such teepees and wigwams were set up across campus with blankets, canoes, and campfires, celebrating (or, perhaps more accurately, muddling,) a variety of Native American customs and artifacts. A group of Blackfoot Indians were brought in from Glacier National Park in Montana to further the theme.
Round collegiate button is blue with an image of a bear and the letter "C" in yellow in the center of the button representing the University of California, Berkeley. Cal's mascot is the golden bears. The school colors since 1875 have been Yale Blue and California Gold. Blue was chosen to represent the ocean along California's coast, and Yale blue was specifically chosen because several of the University's founders attended Yale University. Gold was chosen to represent the gold rush of the 1840s and 1850s that was responsible for populating the state. The use of blue and gold by the school lead to the de facto state colors of California being blue and gold from 1913-1951 with the colors becoming ofifcial state colors later that year.
The bear was selected as the university's mascot because the bear had been the symbol of California dating back to the early days of the California Republic. One of the first appearances of the bear at a Cal athletic event was when the 1895 Cal track team brought a blue banner with the outline of a gold bear to a track meet against powers such as Princeton, Yale, Pennsylvania, and Chicago. The Cal team, who was considered an underdog, triumphed at the track meet, leading them to take the banner to later meets as a good luck token. The team has also been referred to as Grizzlies, Ursae, Bruins, and Bears throughout the years, but Golden Bears has been the team's official mascot since the early 19th century.