Why do the call North Texas MEAN GREEN?

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Why do the call North Texas MEAN GREEN?

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Below is the explanation provided by the "North Texan" online webpage.

Whatever the origins of our Mean Green moniker, according to "Mean" Joe Greene ('69) 鈥?whose real name, by the way, is Charles 鈥?it wasn't his idea.

"I'm proud of the tie and my link to North Texas, but I was too busy playing when the chanting started," he adds. Greene, who played for North Texas from 1966 to 1968, inadvertently gave the nickname national prominence during his career with the Pittsburgh Steelers.

There are at least two explanations for the origin of our "Mean Green" name.

One features North Texas basketball players Willie "Sleepy" Davis ('68) and Ira "Hotrod" Daniels ('69), a small bottle of alcohol and a football game in the '60s. Sleepy was recently anointed by some early Mean Green players to share his version.

He says one Saturday night, after indulging in a little wine at halftime of a North Texas football game, he and Daniels came back into Fouts Field.

"Of course North Texas was beating someone in football, and we were very avid supporters of the other athletics programs there 鈥?everybody supported everybody," he says. "Ira Daniels wasn't satisfied with the cheers, so he got up and started saying to the rest of us, the students sitting in this section, 'Mean Green, you look so good to me,' and we'd say, 'Mean Green.'"

The crowd repeated this over and over, and soon the cheerleaders on the field had stopped to listen, he says. Once they understood what was being said, they joined in.

"After that we did it every game," Davis says. "A lot of people later on started associating it with Joe because his last name was Greene, but it actually started with that simple chant that Saturday night at Fouts Field. And that's the truth."

A different Mean Green story also originates at a North Texas football game in the '60s, one that featured a "spectacular tackle" by Joe Greene.

"That's the way, Mean Greene!" were the words of Sidney Sue Graham ('57), wife of Fred Graham ('57), then the university's sports information director.

"It was merely a spontaneous cheer for an impressive play, but moments later the light bulb went off," she recalls. "I'd been thinking we needed a nickname. All the other really strong defensive units in the country had one."

So she mentally removed the "e" to make "Mean Green" apply to the entire defense.

"Fred said it was too corny," she says.

But he did refer to the "Mean Green Defensive Unit" in one of his press releases about the team, and the name caught on with sports writers.

"The following spring I was at the university bookstore and discovered Mean Green drinking glasses, T-shirts, candle-
holders, etc.," Fred Graham says. "I called an attorney friend and asked if it was too late to get a copyright on the Mean Green nickname on merchandise. His answer, unfortunately, was, 'Yes, too late.'"

When the newspapers first ran the story of how the Grahams arrived at the name, their son's second-grade teacher read it to his class. The boy yelled to his friends, "My mama named the Mean Green!"

However the nickname came to be, the fact remains that it stuck, and "Mean Green" is associated with North Texas teams today.
We're glad someone thought of it.
Others

It is named after 1969 graduate "Mean" Joe Greene, a legendary member of the famous Steel Curtain defense of the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers; however, accounts vary about the actual origins of "Mean Green".

This was the best I could come up with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/university_...
I actually played on a 1983-1984 Mean Green Football Team and Mean Joe called a time or two on recruiting calls. The team went through a few year period where the green was a neon/lime green and the INFAMOUS "Flying Worm" was the helmet icon of the Eagle. We had to be mean! It's like coming out of the tunnel wearing pink! It was a fight for your life to get back to the bus to get out of town kinda deal. This is making me tear up, thinking "Greg Carter for President" and wondering if I knew the Gentle Musers (George Dunham and Craig Miller of The Ticket were there in 1983 at West Hall). I've got "Fly LIke and Eagle" in my brain-pan, running on a loop, and need georgie to help me! Do you know what I mean? To be a scrub, always an outsider? That's NT, man! Always has been, always will be. It makes us mad that the the other schools have real stadiums, real fans (we played a conference championship in front of 11 thousand fans in a 20,000 seat stadium built in 1930 that was considered absolutely perfect for a 1990's film recreating Jesse Owen's track career in the 1930's. It's about wearing Lime green, being smaller than the other team AND less talented, and having an abstract representation of an Eagle on your helmet that really, really, really does look like a flying worm. Its about expanding your 1930's stadium with bleacher seats taken from Carnies. Its about embracing a school that clears out every Thursday evening to Dallas. Its about being angry that your best will never be good enough. It's about thinking you're Charlie Sheen in the movie Platoon when you realize, as you hit the ground (Vietnam) you've made a really big mistake. Oh yes. And the sheer unadulterated joy of beating Texas Tech every few years that is the nirvana of NT. GO MEAN GREEN If I knew the fight song, I swear, I'd sing it now. :)
Traditionally, they're really the Eagles, but there's some variability to the overall meaning behind "Mean Green." Saying they're the "mean green" just because of "Mean Joe" Greene would be like saying the mascot is the Eagle because Don Henley went there, (though there is some argument to the origin of the band's name coming from Don having gone to school there back when it was NTSU); but, the school color is green and the football uniforms traditionally have been all green, or mostly green. I think it's one of those cases where a nickname became more popular than the mascot and became the name by which the team is most popularly known.
I went to UNT.