By John Reagan
August 13, 2021

For a school on its way to its 250th anniversary in the next decade, traditions at Georgetown University are a lot like archaeological ruins - there are layers on top of other layers that tell a story all its own. That's true when peeling back the pages on one of Georgetown's more popular artifacts from its football past: its fight song.

It's no easy song: at 208 words and almost two minutes, It's not for the faint of memory, and is a world apart from fight songs that fit the television age. The University of Georgia fight song clocks in at 16 words and 11 seconds:

Easy to remember, huh?

But at Georgetown, it's also not just one song, but at last three and upon more arcane research, as many as five different compositions melded into a single effort. The last of these, once known as the "Hoya Song", is a tale all its own, and is best known as the part of the consolidated fight song where Georgetown's football rivals are brought to the fore. But even this is not as it seems.


In the 1950's, the Hoya Song was attributed to Dr. Anthony Terranova (M'37), but the song predated Terranova but almost a half century. Terranova's actual composition, "Fight, Georgetown Men", faded away following the suspension of football in the 1950's.

The Hoya Song has no specific lyricist and appears to have been written between 1901 and 1904. The song is about the great football cheers of Eastern football at the turn of the century, ending with "the yell of all the yells" being Georgetown's "Hoya, Hoya Saxa!", of course.

It's since become a list of Georgetown's great football rivals of the era, which, to be frank, is subject to scrutiny, since Georgetown didn't play all of these schools regularly, if at all. Nonetheless, the song and its iterations thereafter have survived the test of time, and in a turn of events was later cited as the schools Georgetown ought to schedule in football. When promoting the move to Division I-AA football in the 1990's, former football coach Bob Benson contended that the Hoyas ought to "play the schools in the fight song" instead of opponents such as Canisius, Iona, or St. Peter's.

The Hoya Song references rival schools - not by name or fame, but of their cheers. In the early days of football, without microphones or loudspeakers, students soon determined that cheers unique to their school stood out against the yells of their opponents. As some cheers were ubiquitous in the early 1900's (the "Locomotive" and "Rocket" cheers were in wide use nationally), school-specific cheers were popular and helped identify the school in the newspaper accounts. It's how "Hoya Saxa" took hold in 1893 and "Hoyas" became the preferred appellation of the teams by the late 1920's.

And for the other schools, it's how Georgetown fans remember them today.



First up was Yale, where Allan Hirsh's melody, titled "Boola Boola", was something of a national sensation when its sheet music debuted in 1901. The inspiration for the University of Oklahoma fight song (Boomer Sooner), the words were well known among college students and fans.

The Yale song was part of the Georgetown sports lexicon even if the rivalry wasn't. The two schools did not meet on the gridiron until 2007.



The U.S. Naval Academy was one of Georgetown's great rivals in the first forty years of the program. The two most prominent college football teams of the Mid-Atlantic region (Maryland was still a smaller agricultural college at this time), the schools met 19 times between 1890 and 1929, all in Annapolis. This was standard operating procedure for the Midshipmen, who played all of its opponents, save the Army-Navy game, at home through the mid-1920's. The 1901 Navy schedule included Georgetown, St. John's, Yale, Lehigh, Penn, Penn State, Dickinson, Carlisle, Washington & Jefferson, and Columbia, all at home.

There may not have been a single "Navy yell", but Georgetown fans that took the railroad to Annapolis likely heard the various yells of the Brigade over the years. It was a recognition of one of its two major rivals on the schedule.

Nowadays, not so much. The schools have not met on the gridiron since 1929.

The second school in the verse is largely there for a rhyme--Georgetown had not played Cornell in football at all and did not do so until 2003, but the Cornell song was well known among fans of the day, and has been copied by numerous schools since. According to the Cornell University site, parts of this song were incorporated into the alma maters at Indiana, Missouri, and North Carolina, among others.

Georgetown and Cornell have met four times in football, most recently in 2019.



If Georgetown could compare its yell to Yale, why not Harvard, too?

Harvard has as many songs written about it as any college program, as much to its longevity as to the number of alumni that went into the publishing business. Amidst such songs as "Harvardiana", "Gridiron King", and the "Ten Thousand Men of Harvard", there was "Our Director", published in 1901, that cites the Harvard defensive line:

Harvard made its first appearance on a Georgetown football schedule in 2014, and will meet for the fifth time in 2021.



Holy Cross was a late arrival to the Georgetown fight song, so to speak. Prior to 1920, the song referenced a Pennsylvania cheer, not a New England one. An early version of the song read Ray! Ray! Ray!, Pennsy is hard to beat, referencing the popular "Ray" cheer in the song known as the "Field Cry Of Penn". At some point, Holy Cross made the next version, referencing a version of its traditional cheer, one which uses the word "Hoiah", a alternate spelling of Hoya. It is not not known why this phrase (also used in the fight song at Marquette as "Ahoya") got into the HC vernacular but its ties to Georgetown are the presumed source.

The two teams have played 32 times, most of any of the named rivals in the song.



Princeton's reference in the fight song is not to the Tiger mascot, but the "Tiger" cheer, which predates the mascot by over 20 years:

Princeton played Georgetown five times from 1903 to 1923, and four times since 2012.


The title of this article references seven rivals in the fight song, not six. So where's the seventh?

Many early fight songs were written about one school in mind--it's why Harvard talks almost exclusively about Yale, for example. The original antagonist of Georgetown football songs was the University of Virginia, which dominated the song known singularly as "There Goes Old Georgetown":

The two schools cancelled a popular but acrimonious football rivalry in 1913, so by the 1930's the references to Virginia fell out of fashion and were replaced with a more generic reference to open the song. Given the competitive levels between Georgetown and Virginia a century later, it's the least likely of the names above to be playing the Hoyas again in the future.

Over a century later, the Georgetown Fight Song works in spite of itself. It's not been substantially rewritten or substituted Big East schools in the interim (and what rhymes with Xavier, anyway?). It remains a popular way to share the Georgetown spirit of old, often with the question "How long has it been?"

So if you'd like to sing along, follow this link.