Why is Miami 'The U'? Explaining the Hurricanes distinctive nickname
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Football, as it’s often said, is a game of inches, but at the college level, it’s also a game of letters.
Teams across the country have the first initial of their schools emblazoned at midfield or on their helmets. Some are iconic while others have become synonymous with their schools — think of Michigan’s Block M, Notre Dame’s interlocking ND monogram, Oklahoma’s interlocking OU, Tennessee’s Power T or Oregon’s O. In the Big Ten alone, 15 of the league’s 18 schools use a letter or initials as their primary athletic marks.
On Monday night, with a national championship on the line, one of college football’s most well-known letters will be making an appearance.
Miami and its famous “U” helmets will be squaring off against Indiana on Jan. 19 at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida, a matchup that marks the Hurricanes’ first berth in a national title game in 23 years. Regardless of whether it wins or loses, it’s safe to say “The U” is back.
But why is the Hurricanes’ synonymous mark a U, particularly at a school that has a name that starts with an M?
Here’s what you need to know about how Miami became “The U”:
Why is Miami The U?
More than 50 years ago, Miami wasn’t quite what it is now, with a languishing football program at a private school derisively referred to by some as “Sun Tan U.”
On the football field, the Hurricanes cycled through a number of different looks, including helmets that had player jersey numbers, an M or a UM on them.
In 1973, the university sought to try to change that. The school’s Athletic Foundation — now known as the Hurricane Club, the athletic department’s fundraising arm — commissioned local public relations specialist Julian Cole, a Miami graduate, and graphic designer Bill Bodenhamer to develop a distinctive logo.
As the school saw it, there were a number of larger, more nationally known schools that were already associated with the letter M or the initials UM, from Michigan to Missouri. It needed something distinct.
It got just that. The duo of Cole and Bodenhamer conceived of a U that was split evenly into two colors — one half orange and the other half green, the Hurricanes’ two primary colors. Bodenhamer in particular believed the U logo lent itself to slogans like “U gotta believe” and “U is great.”
“If you think about it, it was quite a stretch,” Lisa Cole, one of Julian’s daughters, said in 2012 to The Miami Hurricane, the Miami student newspaper. “They took the U and said, ‘This is the university.’”
Only six years later, then-Miami president Henry King Stanford set up a committee to find a potential replacement for the logo, but students pushed back, launching a “Save the U” campaign that was ultimately successful, with the university deciding against making a change. Around that time, Howard Schnellenberger was hired as Miami’s football coach. By his second season, the Hurricanes won nine games and in 1983, at the end of his fifth season, Miami won its first national championship, sparking a dynastic run for the Hurricanes in which they won four titles between 1983-91.
As Miami’s on-field success increased the university’s visibility and allowed it to grow, the U logo became ubiquitous. Players began turning the logo into a hand signal, flashing their hands into the air while connecting them with their thumbs to form a U (opponents have flipped that, literally, by turning it upside down after big plays). The school started to be known not only as Miami, but simply as “The U,” with former Hurricanes standouts referring to their alma mater that way during player introductions on primetime NFL games.
In 2009, the split-U logo extended beyond the fields and courts of play, with the university adopted it as its primary mark.
“It’s kind of an usual step for a university to use an athletic logo as its overall logo for the institution,” Todd Ellenberg, Miami’s assistant vice president for communications and marketing, said to The Miami Hurricane in 2012. “But given that we were so strongly identified with that mark, it really made a lot of sense.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why is Miami ‘The U’? Explaining the Hurricanes distinctive nickname
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