Name-a-Day Calendar, March 11: IUPUI Jaguars
Page 125 of 365
Chosen in: 1998
Chosen by: Student body vote
IUPUI was established in 1969 as a joint venture between the Indianapolis extension centers of Indiana University and Purdue University. They began playing men’s basketball two years later and their first teams were known as the Metros. It’s not entirely clear how this nickname came to be, but the logic would have it that the school’s urban campus gave them more of a “metropolitan” identity than their parent institutions in small-town Bloomington and West Lafayette.
To hear contemporary IUPUI community members tell it, the school’s branding in this era was always sort of a mess. They didn’t have an official logo, and the athletic department’s overuse of a particularly bright shade of red on team uniforms was widely mocked. Former baseball player and current senior associate athletic director Ed Holdaway compared the jerseys to McDonald’s uniforms; another athletic department staffer remembered their red baseball caps being compared to USSR paraphernalia (this was the Cold War era, so that was a huge burn).1
Anyway, IUPUI made the jump to Division I in 1998 and sought to rebrand at the time so they didn’t look like jokes at the highest level of intercollegiate competition in the United States. The school gave the student body three nickname options to choose from in a student body vote: Indy Hawks, River Hawks, and Jaguars. This clearly meant they wanted “Jaguars” to win from the jump, as including two separate “hawk” nicknames was obviously going to split the vote and give the third option a huge advantage. I don’t know if that’s exactly what happened, but it might as well have been: “Jaguars” was the pick and it’s still here today.
IUPUI is slated to split into two separate universities — Indiana University Indianapolis and Purdue University Indianapolis — prior to fall 2024. IU Indianapolis will keep the athletics program. At this point, it’s impossible to say whether the school will rebrand its athletic identity again, but this exact scenario happened in reverse in 2018 when IPFW split into IU Fort Wayne and Purdue Fort Wayne. In that case, the Purdue campus kept the athletic programs and retained their “Mastodons” nickname.
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A more in-depth account of the IUPUI branding story can be found in this 2020 piece published by Indiana University.