Name-a-Day Calendar, August 19: Syracuse Orange
Page 286 of 365
Chosen in: 2004
Chosen by: Nike Team Sports creative director Chris McClure
Syracuse University was founded in 1870 and began playing football in 1889, their very first teams known as the Hillmen.
At the time, Syracuse’s official colors were pink and azure, as they had been since 1873, but alumni sought a change in 1890 and ended up picking orange. (Just orange, not orange and white or orange and navy.) At the time, student newspaper The Syracusan1 said the alumni picked orange because of “the historical affinity … between the Colony of New York and the House of Orange” in the Netherlands, but a 1929 piece in their Alumni News said it was “the hue of strength, vigor, and confidence” and “symbolic of … the glory of the sunrise, and of hopes of a golden future”.
In any case, shortly after this color switch, Syracuse’s football team became known as the Orioles, but this nickname was short-lived. Most sources just referred to the team by the color Orange as they usually took the field wearing all-orange uniforms. This gradually evolved into “Orange Men” and then into “Orangemen” by the late 1950s.
Women’s sports became popular at Syracuse following the implementation of Title IX in the early 1970s. These teams were immediately dubbed the “Orangewomen”.
In 1982, the Syracuse men’s basketball program partnered with Nike. This partnership slowly spread to other sports at the university until Syracuse became fully a Nike school in 2002. I bring this up because, believe it or not, it was actually Nike’s idea for Syracuse to ditch the “men” and “women” suffixes in the team names and become once again known simply as the “Orange”, a switch that occurred in 2004 as part of an overarching school rebrand. Chris McClure, Nike’s creative director of team sports, noted that it was the first thing he did in formulating the rebrand, explaining that all Syracuse athletics programs needed to wear the same logos for it to work.
There’ve been some pushes since then to return to the previous nicknames, mostly out of nostalgia from older alumni, but all of them have failed. Using one nickname just makes sense, after all, for simplicity and unity if nothing else. The Orange are here to stay. Their current mascot is, well, an orange. You know him. Say hi to Otto.
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P.S. I suppose I should mention the Saltine Warrior at some point. He was a derogatory Native American depiction that became Syracuse’s official mascot in 1931 and appeared in various logos until the school got rid of him in 1978 following requests from Native American students. They were actually well ahead of their time in doing this.
None of this has much of anything to do with the nickname (except that association with the Saltine Warrior is sometimes cited as a reason not to return to the “Orangemen/Orangewomen” identity) but I feel like any story on Syracuse’s nickname and mascot history would be incomplete without it.
This newspaper no longer exists.
Hi Otto!!!