Name-a-Day Calendar, March 23: Lafayette Leopards
Page 137 of 365
Chosen in: 1924
Chosen by: Student council
The official explanation as to why Lafayette College nicknamed their athletic teams the Leopards has been lost for nearly a century.
The first Lafayette sports teams were known as the Maroon on account of the school’s primary color. Then, according to a 1927 article in The Lafayette, the school’s student newspaper, “a number of [their] opponents had animal nicknames and someone decided Lafayette should also have one”.
The decision came at the student council meeting on the night of October 21, 1924, and was first recounted in The Lafayette the next day. The paper offered no explanation as to why “Leopards” was chosen or who suggested it, not then and not three years later in the aforementioned article.
A little over a week later during a game at Penn, head football coach Herb McCracken noticed that Penn was having no trouble stymying their offense…almost as if they knew what plays Lafayette was going to run. He then realized that hey, that was exactly what was happening: Penn had decoded Lafayette’s signals, so the Leopards might as well have been screaming their play calls in plain English. To counteract this, McCracken instructed his players to gather in a circle before every offensive play so their signals could stop being intercepted. In doing so, he invented the huddle.
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