OTish: The Victors Lyrics
I love the fight song, think it is among the best in all of sports.
However, unless cheering for football, "champions of the west" sounds a little odd. Aside from the Rose Bowl, which is arguably no longer always UM's preferred bowl destination, I'm not aware of any western geographic location of desired domination for the other sports.
Champions of the rest? Champions and the best?
Gotta love OT season...
10.1.1
10.1.1It says "champions of the West" because the Big Ten used to be known as the Western Conference.
And for good reason. It basically was the west at that time. 12 current states didn't exist in 1888. I don't remember when the Victors was written but not long after that. Even the west coast was still very undeveloped then. A lot west of us was still Indian country.
1898? After beating Chicago in the waning minutes on the road.
A lot of people from downstate think the upper peninsula is indian country.
Please inform as to who you know that holds that moronic thought.
A lot of people from the UP are living in the 19th century
I hope you're joking. I've discussed the UP with thousands of "trolls" [1] over the years. Not a single one of them has used the expression "Indian country."
[1] https://elgl.org/til-about-detroit-knowing-the-difference-between-yoopers-and-trolls/
brings to mind the old joke, "How many U-Pers does it take to eat a raccoon?"
As a person with Native ancestors, there are still many Natives (not Indians) that live in the UP. There are some notable Reservations but many live off-Reservation particularly around the Sault Ste. Marie area.
There is a very large Native Reservation just across the border in Canada. Many Natives freely cross the "border" (Natives do not recognize the political boundaries) between the Reservations.
See also: Northwestern University. Chicago was the northwestern United States at the time.
Bonus trivia: the University of Michigan was "founded in the wilderness in 1817"
Our townships are 36 squares miles, we have Baseline and Meridian roads in places defined by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. (Chicago and Michigan's upper peninsula belong to Wisconsin territory. Toledo belongs to Michigan but Ohio jumps the gun and grabs Toledo as Ohio is defined for statehood. On the other hand, Japan and Korea are farther west and so is New York if you keep going.
+1 From an old Surveyor; for knowing about baseline, meridian, and 36 square miles.
I wanna go back to Joe's and the Orient Pool Room but I can't seem to find them in Ann Arbor now either.
The Western Division of the B1G!
It's champions of west because at the time Michigan played in the Western Conference. They at least still play in the Western Hemisphere so think of it that way.
Google it, just goddamn google it.
I wish I had a better, more patient answer that involved why it's the Champions of the West and the historical roots of the lyrics, but just fucking google it.
link: jfgi.com
Dude, just don’t open the thread. Just don’t open it!
Well... the premise was intriguing and the Victors is something we all have some attachment to. So, why should I not have clicked on it given the title?
Now, if this was a soccer thread and I was bitching about soccer or a recruiting thread and I was saying Who Cares win in the fall? Then by God, my friend, you would have a point. Here, you're just trying to chastise me because I had the temerity to not be very nice about a question that just simply didn't need to be asked. Your point is...not really relevant here.
At the very least, we can claim the western portions of Washtenaw County.
Not so fast my friend, Chelsea High School is returning 14 of their starting 22 from last year.
We’re West of Eastern Michigan and they haven’t beaten us in awhile
To be fair, if Washtenaw County were a piece of paper held along the long edge, its vertical axis would be roughly Zeeb Road (so fold the paper in half and you have Zeeb Road more or less), and most of the Ann Arbor mailing codes (and all of the city) sit east of that line. Even so, it is rather difficult to find a home that does not have Michigan gear of some kind on the property until you're well past that line, so we did sort of conquer the West in that sense.
Not quite. Washtenaw county extends at least 5 miles west of Chelsea and Zeeb road is almost smack dab in the middle of the county.
Whoa!!!
Sorry, East German Judge, but aren't you a bit out of your jurisdiction?
We're talking about Champions of the WEST here, not of the East.
Well, we did come out of the West bracket in the 2018 ncaa tournament. Duh
I don't know the lyrics!
There is nothing more perfect than the Victors.
Don't you dare question that
Username checks out.
+1 for the avatar. That's the cutest face. What's the breed?
Thanks. He's a yellow lab. It was supposed to be our first selfie, but he lunged at the phone as I took the pic. You can see my hat in the background.
As Rabbit21 calmly and patiently pointed out: The phrase "champions of the West" is often misunderstood; it is a reference to Michigan's membership in the Western Conference, later renamed the Big Ten. After Michigan temporarily withdrew from the Western Conference in 1907, a new Michigan fight song "Varsity" was written in 1911 because the line "champions of the West" was no longer relevant.
Which member of "Pop Evil" are you anyway?
So, I work with one their dads. It weird to think of this old man rocking along to that stuff.
Rah! Rah! Rah-rah-rah!
Win for Michigan!
That is TERRIBLE!!! The most generic fight song lines ever -
"rah, rah, fight for <name here>; march down the field"
Just brutally generic and lame, I'm so glad The Victors stands out like it does. I mean, in the pantheon of all-time great fight songs, only ND's can even be compared. If sound clips of bands were playing the various fight songs, only two would be consistently, and correctly, called out by fans around the nation - The Victors and ND's Victory March.
There are no comparison's - especially not 'Varsity'.
So you just answered your own question?
**Double Post!**
Seriously OP?
Country was developed mostly East to West. It is called history.
*colonized
That response has me frightened, Vlad. Knock it the fuck off.
Colonized is probably too mild a term for what this country's inhabitants did once they started the whole Manifest Destiny concept. Anytime anyone thinks that their god(s) entitle them to anything, in particular land and the people living on it, bad things tend to happen.
A lot of Indian tribes did the same things to each other before we got here. Has went on all around the world all throughout history.
Measles and smallpox may have wiped out 95% of the indigenous people making it easy to replace them. Eastern hemisphere diseases found their way to a vulnerable population in the Western hemisphere.
Few seem to ask why there are so many Indians in India or Africans in Africa or Malaysians in Malaysia after colonization compared to the Americas. Bad things happen to good people.
Thanks for posting that. I'll have to keep it handy. Here's another: In his speech justifying his decision to annex Philippines after the Spanish-American War, McKinley starts out by saying that he "heard Gods voice" and that we need to civilize the inhabitants through Christianization (paraphrase).
The problem: as a Spanish colony, much of the Philippines had already been converted to Christianity. I guess God forgot to mention that to him when they were having their conversation...
What was done to the original inhabitants of this continent was horrific and wrong but it is the way the world has always worked. The more powerful groups have always pushed weaker groups out of any territory the stronger group wanted - and the takeovers are normally brutal. Don’t think I am saying it is right, I’m just pointing out that it was not some strange aberration. It is normal human behavior. Not by coincidence, it is also normal behavior for our closest living relatives – chimpanzees. And yes, it is also the way the original inhabitants here operated. The records of the great civilizations of the western hemisphere (Aztec, Mayan in particular) show they operated just as brutally – maybe even more brutally.
For all practical purposes, all the land occupied by humans today was taken by the current inhabitants from the previous possessors, and they took it from the previous, … etc. It has been only very, very recently in human history that even a significant minority of people thought that it was wrong. (Not counting, of course, the group being pushed.) References to God were just a feeble attempt to justify what they were going to do anyway.
And anyone who thinks that this is no longer the way humans operate is very wrong. It has just not been quite as obvious in the last 70 years or so. (It would be interesting to know how many people know why it has not been quite so obvious lately.)
This reminds me of the idea by some Freshman a few years back of a new fight song, and Ace’s column, “A Further Exploration Into a Terrible Idea”