Why are Syracuse's sports teams called the orange?

Answer 1

The name comes from the official school color-orange.

The teams used to be called the orangemen, but it was changed to the orange to be gender neutral.

Syracuse's mascot is Otto the Orange.

About 3,000 U.S. schools used Native names and images in their athletics programs thirty years ago. Nearly one-third have scrapped them. The movement to end stereotyping of Native Americans in sports is now a societal trend, but it still happens campus by campus.

Encouraged by the victory in the heartland, Native students in the East and West stepped up their efforts to end stereotyping in sports. The 42-year-old Indians were traded for the Cardinal at Stanford University in northern California and joined the ranks of Little Red in 1973. Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, ended the half-century run of the Indian in 1974, for Big Green.

Syracuse University's symbol was the next to fall. It began as a joke in 1931, when a student rag described the unearthing of fictitious artifacts, including a "portrait of an early Onondaga chief, O-gee-ke-da Ho-achen-ga-da, the saltine warrior Big Chief Bill Orange."

Citizens of Onondaga Nation, six miles away, were not amused by the hoax, but the school embraced the Saltine Warrior.

"There was the Army mule, Navy goat, Georgia bulldog and Syracuse Indian," said Oren Lyons, an Onondaga faithkeeper who played Lacrosse under the Saltine Warrior emblem. "We were subhumans in sports." Syracuse consigned its 45-year-old symbol to the archives in 1975. In its place they chose to honor a fruit and school color, the Orange.