Name-a-Day Calendar, March 4: Illinois Fighting Illini
Page 118 of 365
Chosen in: Early 1920s
Chosen by: A slogan contest for the drive that gave us Memorial Stadium
The University of Illinois began playing football in 1890 without an official nickname, but the team was sometimes unofficially called the Indians or by the school colors: “Orange and Blue”.
The term “Illini” being associated with the university actually predates the football team — the student newspaper made it their name in January 1874 — but sports teams would begin using it on and off in the late 1900s and early 1910s, then all the time by 1916. The phrase “fighting Illini” is said to have first been used to recap a men’s basketball game against Purdue on March 3, 1911, but this appears to have been a coincidental turn of phrase that had nothing to do with the eventual renaming of the team.
That would come in the early 1920s, when the football team was vying for a new stadium as a memorial to students who died in the recent Great War. The school held a drive to raise funds for the new stadium and they ran a contest to select a catchy slogan that would make people want to give them their money.
Some of the slogans played off the stadium’s memorial nature (“They went across for us — let’s come across for them.”), while some were more standard (“Stand up for the stadium, and sit down at the games.”). The winner of the contest was “Build that stadium for fighting Illini”. The stadium would break ground in 1922 and open in 1923, and the “Fighting Illini” phrase would come to be used as an increasingly more official nickname for all of the school’s sports teams throughout the rest of the 1920s.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably at least somewhat familiar with what the word “Illini” means. It was used to refer to the dozen tribes in the Illinois Confederation of Native Americans; the word simply means “men” in their Algonquian language. This led to the university adopting a Native American Chief, Illiniwek, as their symbol (specifically not a mascot) in 1926. They kept this up for 80 years until 2005, when the NCAA moved to eradicate unsanctioned Native American imagery; Chief Illiniwek was retired in 2007.
Of course, because the “Fighting Illini” nickname predated Chief Illiniwek and does not refer to any specific tribe of Native Americans, the NCAA allowed Illinois to keep the nickname, to the dismay of some.
Since then, the school has slowly moved toward adopting a mascot to replace the Chief Illiniwek symbol. In 2020, the university senate voted 105-2 to endorse the belted kingfisher, a bird native to Illinois, as a mascot, though this was just an advisory vote and many students disagree with it. Some want Chief Illiniwek to return, though this will never happen. In any case, the Fighting Illini nickname isn’t going anywhere.
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