Who Dat!?! A possible answer from a Nicholls State professor

To bail me out in my current gig as city editor at The Courier and Daily Comet, my buddy Dwayne Fatherree tracked down the Nicholls State professor who traced the history of Who Dat.

He tells her tale here: bit.ly/1GTv0dK 

The NFL tried to lay claim to the chant, popular at New Orleans Saints games, while the boys were making their Super Bowl run after the 2009 season. The league backed down amid popular backlash (and I suspect a weak case), leaving Who Dat where it belongs _ to the fans and others who have used it over the years.

Some of  Shana Walton's findings were:

What Walton's team was able to document was that the Who Dat phrase generally, and specifically as part of a football chant, had been around for far longer than either Monistere or the NFL could legitimately lay claim to.

Her team's report, however, never saw the light of day. Before any of the cases went to trial, the NFL dropped its lawsuits, prompting others to do the same. The report was submitted to the court, and did make its way into the record of some of the other litigation over the use of the phrase. But none of those actions drew the same media attention as the NFL's lawsuit.

“I have no idea why they rolled over,” Walton said of the NFL's decision to withdraw its litigation. “I can tell you what the research did show There were three claims to authorship of the chant. One said the chant originated with St. Aug. One said it originated in the Southwestern Athletic Conference. And one said it originated at Patterson High School.”

But even those sources, Walton said, were not the originators of the “Who dat” term. That little two-word phrase, those six letters, can be traced back far enough to pre-date the United States.

“We started moving back in time, because the chant is actually part of a longer lineage of language play,” Walton said. “It started out as 'Who dat?' That language play goes all the way back to colonial America. You can find that documented in colonial newspapers. It is a way that Anglo-Americans have made fun of and mocked African-Americans. We found examples of use of it in newspapers all over the country.”

It's good stuff she found and good reporting and writing by Dwayne. Worth reading in The Courier and Daily Comet. And, maybe a lesson for the multi-billion league next time they want to claim a cheer used by fans.