"Tigers"

JUST in case any of you are still confused or uninformed ..:)

In 1893,
Dr. Charles Coates was recruited by LSU from the Ivy League to be the Director of the Department of Chemistry; as well as the school's first football coach, in the early 1890s.

HEEEEEEEEE chose the name "Tigers" , using the then current custom in the Northeast of naming schools' mascots after ferocious animals (Yale Bulldogs, Brown Bears, Princeton Tigers, etc.).
He even chose the initial Mascot Tiger Head and helped pick the school colors (the first game in 1893 vs Tulane was during Mardi Gras, and the only colors available in stores were purple, green and gold The original colors were blue and white.)

In addition, Coates felt that purple and gold (yellow) - being complementary colors on the Artist's Color Wheel - would lend themselves very well with the image he had in mind...rather than blue and white.

Over 75 years later, La. Author Dan Hardesty, in one of his sports history books, recalled a speech Dr. Coates made at a reunion banquet given in honor of his first 1893 Tiger team, decades later, in the 1930s.

In it, Coates put to rest the erroneous myths of his supposedly naming the team after the Louisiana Tigers - a Confederate regiment who had fought at Manassas three decades before he arrived in Baton Rouge.

"It was a myth," Coates related. "I had never even heard of that war outfit from thirty years in the past. I actually borrowed the team name from my Ivy League experience and tradition. But, rumors being what they were."

In other words, when Coates arrived on campus, he borrowed the moniker 'Tigers' from Princeton of the Ivy League. He had never heard of any war unit from 30 years prior. (They HAD in fact, existed of course, but Coates had no way of knowing about them when he came down to Louisiana in 1893, and so had nothing at all to do with his deciding on the name Tigers from his background in the Northeast.)

Another interesting fact is that the word "Fighting" was not added to the name until the 1950s, in honor of a brigade of World War Ii fighter pilots from Louisiana! - Major General Claire Lee Chennault - who led the Flying Tigers. :)