Fight with ferocious ferociously!

I have a friend whose son played football for Army, which here in the lovely Hudson Valley is the closest thing we have to a college team. College football is a big fat nothing in most of the northeast -- it's hard now to believe that Columbia was a football powerhouse in the early twentieth century.

Army football was pretty bad when I moved to this area, which is why I called for bringing back the military draft, assuming some talent would be swept up with the masses. But in 2016, some weird things started happening -- the Black Knights got a passing game, and started ending seasons with a winning record. My friend's son has been off the team for some years, so I told my pal that clearly his young man had set the wheels in motion toward their current success. "Yeah," he said, "or maybe they've been getting peewee opponents."

Regardless, this Saturday is the big Army-Navy game, and Navy's kind of sucking wind this year, so it should be a good one for Army fans and veterans.

But it got me thinking about college football fight songs. As I've noted before, my small college was so invisible to the NCAA that our division didn't even get a Roman numeral. I may have been mistaken when I wrote that the division was represented by an emoji (😜), as I attended in the pre-emoji era, but it was something like that. Maybe Division §. If we had a fight song, it probably had two power chords and was composed by a bad garage band called the Future Podiatrists of America. Or the Free Design.

Members of my family, though, knew the Notre Dame fight song (a.k.a. "Cheer, Cheer for Old Notre Dame"), even though they were not Catholic or from Indiana or had ever been to college. Hell, they knew "Buckle Down, Winsocki," even though they weren't from the fictional town in the film Best Foot Forward. A good fight song is a good song.

Since my schools going back to kindergarten have been historically lame at sports, I've decided to pick some other fight song. Here are the ones I am considering -- note that I'm posting this on December 5, 2018, and if you're viewing this page in The Future, Where We Will Spend the Rest of Our Lives, YouTube will probably have reshuffled the videos and they won't appear below, because even though Blogger and YouTube are owned by the same company, they don't care if they hose the lowly blogmeister. Let's give it a shot.

Here's Tom Lehrer's, for Harvard, one of his first parodies, written when he was an undergraduate at said school:

When I posted Lehrer's song in the comments of the Great Lileks's site, a fellow commenter (I believe it was NH_Flier) posted "We Are Victorious," the military march from the film The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.

But I'm leaning toward Weird Al's most excellent generic sports fight song:

Any one of these is better and more sincere than that precious "Fight Song" that one hears from time to time, usually from people who have never landed a punch or gotten so much as a black eye. It isn't strong enough to inspire a Pop Warner team.

"Wrecking balls inside my brain"? You don't need a fight song, kid, you need Unisom. I'm sticking with Al.