Name-a-Day Calendar, May 27: North Texas Mean Green
Page 202 of 365
Chosen in: 1966
Chosen by: Sidney Sue Graham, wife of school Sports Information Director Fred Graham
The school we now know as the University of North Texas has its roots all the way back in 1890, but it didn’t begin playing football until 1913, when it was named North Texas State Normal College. This team, along with the men’s basketball team that began play in 1916, was usually called the Normalites or the Normal Boys.
In 1921, this was deemed unacceptable, and a joint council of students and faculty started a petition to choose an official mascot. This council solicited suggestions from the student body with the only restriction being that they couldn’t use a mascot that was already in use by another large college in Texas. The council narrowed the suggestions down to four finalists: Dragons, Eagles, Hawks, and Lions.
The student body voted on these mascots on February 1, 1922, and the winner was obvious: the eagle won in a landslide, garnering 17 times as many votes as the second place dragon. North Texas State’s teams became known as the Eagles, effective immediately.
It’s likely that North Texas would still be known as the Eagles today if not for a particularly creative fan having connections to school administration.
On September 24, 1966, the Eagles hosted the Miners of Texas Western College (now known as UTEP) in football. The Miners jumped out to a 3-0 lead in the first quarter and made it 9-0 with a touchdown early in the third. This upset one Sidney Sue Graham, who began loudly chanting for the Eagles to close the gap. The Eagles wore green uniforms, so her chants largely played on that color: “Come on green, get mean!” and “Here we go mean green!” echoed throughout her section of the stadium.
This caught on with the fans around her and she thought the school itself should use it in some official capacity. Luckily for her, she just so happened to be married to the school’s sports information director, Fred Graham. When she first brought the idea up to him, he originally called it “corny”, but he eventually came around on it and gave the nickname a passing mention in a press release a few weeks later.
The “Mean Green” blew up from there, and by 1968, it was the football team’s nickname almost as much as “Eagles” was, though it still wasn’t official. That would come in 1973, when legendary coach Hayden Fry took over the program. He liked the nickname a lot and promoted it as the official nickname of his teams. This usage continued even after he left for Iowa in 1979.
“Mean Green” was generally used to refer only to the football team for about three decades; every other team was the Eagles. This changed in 2000, when Rick Villarreal took over as the school’s athletic director, trademarked the Mean Green nickname, and announced it as the official nickname for all North Texas sports teams.
The mascot, on the other hand, was (and is) still the eagle. Its name is Scrappy.
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