History of the Vandals

The Idaho Vandals are the intercollegiate athletic teams representing the University of Idaho in Moscow. The Vandals compete at the NCAA Division I level as a member of the Big Sky Conference.

The football team was independent for the 2013 season due to a significant wave of departures from the Western Athletic Conference that left just two football-playing schools. In July 2014, Idaho returned its football team to the Sun Belt Conference, and the other sports rejoined the Big Sky Conference.

The university's official colors are silver and gold, honoring the state's mining tradition. Because these metallic colors in tandem are not visually complementary for athletic uniforms, black and gold are the prevalent colors for the athletic teams, with occasional silver, similar to Colorado, whose official colors are also silver and gold. When Idaho moved out of the Big Sky to the Big West in 1996, the yellow "Green Bay" gold was changed to metallic "Vegas" gold.^[4] Yellow gold, and black were the colors used by most of the varsity teams from 1978 to 1996, initiated by first-year head football coach Jerry Davitch's new uniforms for 1978.

College Sports Established
1899

Location
Moscow, Idaho

College Name
University of Idaho

Collegiate History
1973 - Present / NCAA Division 1
1921 - 1973 / University Division of the NCAA
1922 - 1921 / Athletic Association of the United States

Conference History
2015 – Present / Big Sky Conference
2005 - 2014 / Western Athletic Conference
1996 - 2004 / Big West Conference
1963 - 1977 / Big Sky Conference
1922 - 1959 / Pacific Coast Conference

Nickname
Vandals - Idaho's athletic teams go by a name earned nearly a century ago by a basketball team coached by Hec Edmundson, whose teams played defense with such intensity and ferocity that sports writers said they "vandalized" their opponents. The mark made by that 1917 team went far deeper than wins and losses on the court. In 1917, Harry Lloyd "Jazz" McCarty – a writer for the student newspaper, The Argonaut – tagged the team with a new nickname in a pregame write-up: "The opening game with Whitman will mark a new epoch in Idaho basketball history, for the present gang of 'Vandals' have the best material that has ever carried the 'I' into action." McCarty's indirect suggestion stuck. By 1921, McCarty and Edward Maslin Hulme, the dean of the College of Liberal Arts, succeeded in their push to have Vandals officially adopted as the nickname for Idaho teams.

NCAA Championships
Baseball 0

Men's Basketball 0

Women's Basketball 0

Football 0

Soccer 0