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.
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.
Button featuirng an image of the first Handsome Dan, mascot of the Yale Unviersity Bulldogs.
Handsome Dan was college athletics first live mascot, first appearing in 1889. He Ihas been stuffed and is currently on display in Yale's Payne Whitney Gymnasium's trophy room.