The Best College Football Traditions
Vote on college football traditions: the drills, the yells, the animals and the tailgates a Saturday actually runs on. No ranking sits underneath this list. A rock, a horse, a lawn and a marching drill share no unit, so the scope gate is the editorial claim here and the order is yours. Three rules set membership. The tradition needs its own Wikipedia article. It has to belong to a football gameday, something done, displayed or paraded around the game, rather than a rivalry trophy or a fight song. And each programme gets one entry. Thirty-six candidates were probed and eighteen cleared those rules; a cap on how many SEC programmes could appear, and the room available, settled the rest. The article rule bites hardest, because several famous crowd rituals could not be located at a page of their own, so Jump Around, the White Out, the Vol Navy and the Iowa Wave are absent. Read that as a filing outcome, not a verdict. Two bands: what happens inside the stadium on gameday, and everything else that clears the gate.
Script Ohio is #1 on “The Best College Football Traditions”.
- 1
Script Ohio
Watch the band come out onto the field in a triple Block O and unwind the whole formation into cursive letters, which takes about three and a half minutes. A trumpet player dotted the i first, on 10 October 1936 against Pittsburgh, and the job moved to sousaphones later because they are easier to pick out. Honorary dotters have included Woody Hayes and Jack Nicklaus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Script_Ohio - 2
Howard's Rock
Players touch a lump of quartzite on a pedestal at the top of the hill, then run down it into the stadium, which is about as simple as a tradition gets. Frank Howard was given the stone by a friend who picked it up in Death Valley, California, and told his team in 1967 that rubbing it meant giving him everything they had.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard%27s_Rock - 3
Calling the Hogs
Arms up, fingers wiggling, and a Woo held for a full eight seconds before the Pig Sooie lands. Three times through, then Razorbacks, and the whole stadium does it before kickoff. Fans date it to the 1920s, when a cheer got borrowed to lift a team that was losing, and the eight-second Woo is enforced by peer pressure alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calling_the_Hogs - 4
Osceola and Renegade
Rider and Appaloosa come out after the team, gallop to midfield, and put a burning spear into the turf while the band plays. It started on 16 September 1978 against Oklahoma State. The regalia is designed and approved by the Seminole Tribe of Florida, and that backing is why the imagery survived NCAA review in 2005.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osceola_and_Renegade - 5
Hook 'em Horns
Index finger and little finger up, middle two pinned by the thumb, and you have a longhorn's head. Harley Clark, a head cheerleader, showed it at a Gregory Gym pep rally in 1955, and the crowd had it the next day at the TCU game. Nothing to build and nothing to feed, which is why it is up all over the stands from kickoff on. Rivals return it upside down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hook_%27em_Horns - 6
Ralphie the Buffalo
Five students in white hold the rope and try to steer a live bison round the field before each half, which she covers at up to twenty-five miles an hour because nobody is really steering anything. Seven animals have done the job since 1967. Handlers train more than twenty hours a week and earn varsity letters for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralphie_the_Buffalo - 7
Traveler (USC)
Score, and a white horse gallops the length of the Coliseum sideline while the band plays Conquest, which has been the arrangement since 1961. The rider's first outfit was the one Charlton Heston wore in Ben Hur, too heavy to keep using, so Richard Saukko made his own leather version in 1962 and it has been copied ever since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveler_(mascot) - 8
Ramblin' Wreck
Students drive a 1930 Ford Model A sport coupe out ahead of the Georgia Tech team at Bobby Dodd Stadium, and have done since 30 September 1961, when it first led them onto Grant Field against Rice. Only forty-six people have ever been elected to drive it, and freshmen are not allowed to touch it at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramblin%27_Wreck - 9
Stanford Tree
Nobody here has an official mascot, so the band supplies one: a nine-foot sequoia in a homemade costume, dancing on the sideline where a mascot would stand. It came out of a 1975 argument about what should replace the retired Indian mascot, and it stuck. Each year's Tree builds a new suit and has to survive Tree Week to get the job.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_Tree - 10
Toomer's Corner
Win, and the students head out of the stadium and downtown to throw toilet paper over the oaks and the power lines at the corner of Magnolia Avenue and College Street until the whole intersection is white. A man poisoned those trees with herbicide in 2010 out of spite after an Iron Bowl. Auburn replanted, and the rolling carried on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toomer%27s_Corner - 11
Midnight Yell Practice
At midnight before a home game, twenty thousand and more file into Kyle Field to rehearse the noise they will make tomorrow. Five elected yell leaders in painted overalls run it with hand signals. Then the lights go off, dates get kissed, and anyone without one flicks a lighter. It started in 1932 because two freshmen asked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Yell_Practice - 12
The Grove (Ole Miss)
Tailgaters claim their patch under the oak, elm and magnolia the evening before kickoff, then fill ten acres of campus with tents, chandeliers and people in blazers. Nobody drives in; cars were banned after a rainstorm in 1991. The team walks through the middle of it on the way to the stadium. A tailgate with a dress code and a route.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grove_(Ole_Miss) - 13
Word of Life (Touchdown Jesus)
Look north from inside the stadium and a figure with both arms raised used to rise over the rim, which is how a mosaic on the Hesburgh Library wall came to be called Touchdown Jesus. Millard Sheets finished it in 1964: 134 feet high, 324 panels, stone from sixteen countries. Expansion of the stands has since blocked part of that view.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_of_Life_(mural) - 14
Nittany Lion Shrine
Queue up on campus with everyone else to be photographed beside a thirteen-ton block of Indiana limestone before kickoff, and again in a gown on graduation day. Heinz Warneke carved the lion, and it was dedicated at homecoming on 24 October 1942. The right ear keeps getting broken off, and Syracuse students once painted the whole animal orange.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nittany_Lion_Shrine
How this list was ranked
Readers rank this list by voting items up and down. Items are ordered by reader votes.
