Humor

Budget Constraints Force Big Ten Athletic Teams to Rename Themselves after Prominent Snacks

Iowa HoHo’s protest, Fig-Bars beat Cheetos 78-64

Shrinking enrollments at Big Ten Schools has forced league schools to turn to corporate sponsorship as the only way to support athletic teams. League officials have recently approved a switch to snack-based team names in order to attract corporate interest.

Officials are delighted with the increased funding, and Big Ten spokesperson, Buck Selleck, said “We feel that changing the school mascots and nicknames gives students a meaningful introduction to the corporate structure of adult life.”

Students were somewhat surprised by the change, and although there was initial resistance, the increased possibilities for corporate sponsorship of fraternities, sororities and even individual coeds wearing corporate logos has them intrigued. One fraternity at Michigan State has already changed its name to Eta Pizza Pi under contract to a prominent local franchise.

The strongest resistance to the change has come from the Iowa Ho-Ho alumni, and the Iowa women’s field hockey team, the first Iowa team to compete under the new snack-based team name. Dale Pendergrast, Class of 1969, said “We spent too many years where the Iowa football team was a joke, and now that we’re going somewhere, we sound like a bunch of Santa Clauses.”

Iowa women’s hockey players complained that competing players were “having a field day” by shortening the snack-based portion of the Iowa Ho-Ho’s name to a single syllable, an appellation that has a pejorative connotation in major metropolitan environments.

In addition to the new Iowa HoHo’s, the other new Big Ten team names are the Indiana Ding-Dongs, the Michigan State Cheetos, the Michigan Fig Bars, the Purdue Twinkies, the Minnesota Fritos, the Ohio State Snickers, the Illinois Slim Jims, the Northwestern Oreos, theWisconsin Cheez-Wiz, and the Pennsylvania Jelly Bellys.

The new Iowa Bite Song (formerly the Iowa Fight Song) has the following lyrics, which Iowa Ho-Ho fans are encouraged to learn:

We’re gonna bite bite bite for Iowa
We’re gonna eat our HoHo snack
We’re gonna bite bite bite for Iowa
Cause they won’t give the old name back
We’re gonna chew chew chew for Iowa
We’re eatin’ HoHo’s ’til we cannot eat a thing
We’re gonna bite bite bite for Iowa.
We’re getting paid to sing.

The rewrite of the classic “On Wisconsin” tune is still underway, but preliminary information at press time indicates that the new song will be titled “Add Some Cheez-Wiz.”

In an inaugural demonstration of the new name conventions, the Michigan Fig-Bars beat The Wisconsin Cheetos 78-64 in a recent Bisquickball game. And, in a related story, several Iowa HoHo players were selected to the Bike Supported Athlete Footpowderball team, including Dale Heckroth at dollarback,, Joe Lauterbach at fullrideback,, Jack Coen at stocksplit end, and “Moose” Jensen at block&decker.

The Big Ten office (soon to be renamed the “Snack-Ten” office) is accepting comments on the new naming policy at the following e-mail address: tufftoenails@ProctrNgambl.com.