Name-a-Day Calendar, November 23: Auburn Tigers
Page 17 of 365
Chosen in: 1892
Chosen by: We don’t know, but we do know where they got it from
Auburn University’s sports teams have always been known as the Tigers, going back all the way to their very first football game in 1892. It’s unknown who made the decision to call them the Tigers, but Auburn claims the nickname comes from a line in Oliver Goldsmith’s 1770 poem “The Deserted Village” about an Irish settlement named Auburn “where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey”. Most of the rest of that poem is about the village being abandoned due to corruption and greed from the ruling class, which…man, that just really makes you wanna shout “War Eagle”, eh?
About that: Auburn has never been known as the War Eagles, the Eagles, or anything but the Tigers. Not even unofficially. “War Eagle” is simply a chant. Where exactly it came from appears to be the stuff of various contradicting legends. Read about them and decide for yourself which one you believe to be true.1
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I’m going with #2. Sports crowds have a long and proud history of misunderstanding what’s going on in the game and this story is the one that seems the least like BS.