5 Of American College Football’s Greatest Traditions – 英会話・英語　アミック

Autumn is an extremely important time of year for people that live in certain parts of the United States. In addition to the fall harvest, Halloween festivities, and Thanksgiving, it’s also the season for America’s third-most popular spectator sport: college football. 

College football is a weird mix of modern commercial sport, 100-year old traditions, and sometimes ugly tribalism. This is especially true in the Midwest and southern parts of the country, where despite its short season, the sport is talked and thought about all year long. Similar to a religious pilgrimage, fans wait all year to make one or two trips to their favorite university team’s stadium, sometimes driving hundreds of miles in the process. Before the game, many tailgaters park in the same spot they have for decades, grilling food and playing games with younger generations whom will one day carry on the same customs with their own families. 

Once inside the actual stadium, students, fans, and alumni observe or take part in school traditions that have been happening long before they were born. Every university with a football program could have a book written about their own history and customs, but here are five of my favorite traditions from across college football:

Running With Ralphie

Several schools have a live animal that serves as the school’s mascot. None of them however are as large as the University of Colorado’s Ralphie the Buffalo. Since 1934, five different Ralphies (along with five student handlers in charge of steering her) charge out onto the field before each home game. Occasionally Ralphie even breaks free or drags some of her handlers along for a ride.

Clanga-Clanga

There are certain ‘artificial noisemakers’ that can’t be brought into a sports stadium, such as airhorns or anything that makes so much noise the opposition can’t hear themselves think. That is unless you are Mississippi State, whose fans have been bringing custom-decorated cowbells to games since the early 1900s, when a cow wandered onto the field in the middle of a game. It is said that Bulldog fans can’t buy their first cowbell for themselves, but instead it must be gifted as a rite of passage.

Jump Around

What happens when you mix a nearly-30 year old hip-hop song and 80,000 University of Wisconsin Badger fans? Sometimes, an earthquake. In between the third and fourth quarters of every home game at Camp Randall Stadium, House of Pain’s “Jump Around” blares through the loudspeakers, prompting every person in the stadium to indeed jump up and down. The effect is so powerful that the tradition has been cancelled in the past due to concerns about the stadium’s structural integrity. 

The Kinnick Wave 

This tradition is only a year old, but all agree it’s a keeper. In 2017, the University of Iowa recently opened a new children’s hospital that overlooks the Hawkeyes’ football stadium. At the end of the first quarter of each home game, every fan, player, and coach in the stadium pauses what they are doing and waves to the children and their families watching from the hospital’s top floor.  

Script Ohio

Who thought cursive handwriting could give someone chills? Since 1936, The Ohio State University Marching Band has been doing just that to Buckeye football fans whenever it performs ‘Script Ohio’. Starting from a block formation at the top of the field, band members high-step their way in a follow the leader formation, timing their steps perfectly as to not collide with each other when crossing paths, all while playing ‘Le Régiment de Sambre et Meuse’, an old French military march. The formation ends with the 228-band members spelling out Ohio and the customary bowing by the sousaphone player after he ‘dots’ the i.