St. Joe’s To Combine Hawk, Eagle In Mad Experiment

The city’s Division I college football team lineup is about to get a little bigger.

No, St. Joe’s isn’t starting a football team. But the school is set to adopt fellow Jesuit institution Boston College’s football team. Wait. Guh-wah?

A survey at St. Joe’s last year revealed some kids who go to Joe’s miss having a football team on campus. Of course, a football team is expensive — “The University has so many financial commitments at the present time that creating a football team would be prohibitively costly.” — so the school just decided to create a partnership with BC instead. The adoption, the school paper says, will allow St. Joe’s students to go up to BC for a game and root, root, root for the Eagles.

Or, perhaps, the Eagle-hawks:

The Oct. 2, 1987 edition of The Hawk contained a letter to the editor with a poll to select a team for St. Joe’s students to follow through The Hawk sports section. The Auburn Tigers collected the most votes, and from 1987-1991 the students of Saint Joseph’s embraced Auburn University’s football program as their own.

Hawk articles referred to the Auburn team as the Tiger-Hawks, and students could follow the ups and downs of this adopted team through the student newspaper.

In the first year of the adoption, approximately 100 Saint Joseph’s students went to take part in Auburn’s 1987 Homecoming. Auburn offered free tickets for their Homecoming game to anyone presenting a Saint Joseph’s I.D.

Students trekked to Auburn for a second time in 1988 and again in 1989.

Saint Joseph’s interest in Auburn eventually waned following an unsuccessful 1991 season that was further tainted with play-for-pay allegations made by former Auburn defensive back Eric Ramsey.

Ain’t that how it always is? You adopt a random football team in Alabama to root for, and then that team ends up paying its players. If I had a nickel for every time that happened…

St. Joe’s adopts BC football team [The Hawk]
The enemy of my enemy [Soft Pretzel Logic]
[Original photo from BC Eagles Football]