What's In A Name? Dana Holgorsen's Comments on UCF Space Game Uniforms Welcome Important Questions
UCF football has worn an alternate “Space Game” uniform every year since its national championship campaign in 20171, most recently donning a blue look for the Nov. 11 rout of Oklahoma State.
The Space Game uniforms — designed to celebrate the University of Central Florida’s collaborations with Cape Canaveral — generate some buzz leading into the weekend and during the game, then disappear into the ether.
It’s 2023, and an alternate uniform is a pretty standard facet of the college football experience, after all.
Not in this case.
Two weeks out from their regular-season finale meeting with UCF, Houston coach Dana Holgorsen derided the Space Game uniforms. From his weekly radio show on Nov. 14:
“Central Florida’s got those unis — I don’t know what the heck they are — but they’re some blue unis. You could say the same thing about us but we’re a little different with that2. It’s some ‘Space City’ thing. I thought we [Houston] were Space City?”
The host mentioned the “launchpad” at Cape Canaveral, which Holgorsen said “isn’t close,” about 45 minutes from the UCF campus.
Among my myriad gripes with conference realignment is the degradation of rivalries like Colorado-Nebraska and USC-Stanford.
The UCF-USF War on I-4 is hardly in league with such series — though the 2017 installment is one of the most entertaining games in recent memory.
Still, it’s a shame that UCF leaving the American Athletic Conference for the Big 12 put a budding, regional rivalry on hiatus. With the Big 12 set to become a league stretch from coast-to-coast but mostly centralized between the Colorado and Mississippi Rivers, UCF is on its own outpost.
The Knights need a rival, because every college football program needs a rival. With none available in their regional footprint, why not one stemming from uniform slander and aerospace trash talk?
It’s no less preposterous than Michigan and Minnesota having a rivalry born from Fielding Yost’s paranoia of being poisoned — and it’s light years (pardon the space pun) ahead of the abortive Civil ConFLiCT3.
UCF and Houston also have history insomuch as they were both members of Conference USA and the American at the same time, and moved to the Big 12 together.
Maybe I’m grasping at straws to manufacture an ingredient of college football vital to its popularity — tradition — but someone needs to be thinking about these things.
But on the topic of tradition, the Space Game uniforms beg a question: What’s with so many of Florida’s relative newcomers to Div. I football abandoning their original branding?
UCF and its embrace of ties to Cape Canaveral and the Sunshine State’s role in space travel serve as reminder that the school once built its identity around aerospace.
When it was Florida Tech University, UCF debuted its original mascot, the Citronaut.
Friends of The Press Break over at The Low Major, in their Name-A-Day series, provide background on UCF becoming the Golden Knights (and later Knights4), noting students hated the Citronaut in 1969.
Given the generation that rebuffed the Citronaut, I feel justified in using this expression: OK, boomer.
More details on the (d)evolution of UCF branding are available in the school’s official magazine, Pegasus — another nickname suggested for the university’s teams that would have been much more original than Knights —
The Citronaut has gained status as a cult favorite in more recent years, thus making the mascot a parallel for the 1980s film shot in part on the UCF campus, The Miami Connection: Unappreciated in its own time, but embraced for its earnestness and originality decades later.
And speaking of Miami, a university based in the city, FIU, made a similarly misguided change in branding as UCF. In 1987, the same year The Miami Connection debuted, FIU became the Golden Panthers.
Like UCF, the “Golden” adjective eventually faded to make the name even less distinct — and in FIU’s case, especially baffling, since its athletic programs are now the lesser of two Miami-based teams called Panthers. The 2023 Stanley Cup runner-up Florida Panthers debuted in 1993.
Before 1987, FIU’s mascot was the Sunblazer.
Five years earlier over in Tampa, the only of the three Div. I Florida schools to undergo a name change in this era that actually started with “Golden” as part of its moniker was the most misguided in moving away from it.
Known since 1982 as the “Bulls” — a nickname one hears and likely imagines Ray Clay introducing Michael Jordan and Co. over the sounds of The Alan Parsons Project’s “Sirius” — USF was previously the Golden Brahma.
A 2021 article from the university’s magazine includes a superhero-style mascot that’s equal parts the worst and best college mascot I’ve ever seen.
The pursuit of simplicity robbed three programs of originality. Since UCF’s Space Game uniforms are about reaching for the stars, I suggest the schools grab onto that spirit and be similarly bold with their branding.
The Cougars wore Houston Oilers-inspired threads earlier this season. Not only were they awesome, but blue (albeit a different shade) is one of UH’s colors.
The brief, fever-dream history of the UCF-UConn “rivalry” trophy that Bob Diaco manufactured for still-uncertain reasons deserves its own newsletter drop. Someday.
I’ve learned that the “Golden” part is a VERY dirty to some UCF fans in the present day. I once off-handedly referred to the program as Golden Knights on my now-defunct blog, and was harassed in the comments into deleting it.