Mizzou on Game Day, Football, Identity, and the Missouri Tiger

The Missouri Tiger did not begin as a mascot chosen from a committee's shortlist. It began as a threat. During the Civil War, a group of Columbia men formed a militia company to defend the town against guerrilla raids.

One of their units, facing down a band of Confederate partisans near Hallsville in eighteen sixty-four, allegedly called out that they were the Tigers of Columbia, and the name stuck. The University of Missouri adopted it in the eighteen-nineties, and the tiger has been the athletic symbol of Mizzou ever since. Memorial Stadium, which Columbia calls Faurot Field, opened in nineteen twenty-six and seats more than sixty thousand.

On a home Saturday in autumn the city's population effectively doubles. The students who pour out of the dorms and apartments and cross the quad to the stadium are walking a route that passes the Columns, past the journalism school, past buildings named for donors and administrators whose names most fans couldn't identify but whose money built the institution those fans are rooting for. Missouri's most celebrated football era ran from the late nineteen-fifties through the mid-nineteen-seventies under coach Dan Devine, whose nineteen sixty team is claimed as a national champion, and later under Al Onofrio.

The recent era of relevance came in the late two thousands, when Chase Daniel quarterbacked the team to consecutive Big Twelve North division titles and top-ten finishes. The program joined the Southeastern Conference in twenty-twelve, a seismic conference realignment that restructured the entire landscape of college athletics in the South and Midwest. On the street corners outside the stadium before kickoff, people are selling T-shirts and drinking coffee and talking about the game, and for a few hours Columbia is not a college town or a mid-Missouri city or any particular place in history.

It is just itself, which is enough.