The "Who Dat?" Cheer

[jonahdsage]

so the saints cheer "who dat?" now. never heard it before, maybe i'm wrong. I was observing a steeler's message board earlier that announced we stole who dat and changed it to who dey, which personally offended me. can anyone confirm or deny this? wikipedia says we've been who deying since the early 80's. if the saints didn't start with who dat, man, what a joke.

[BlainThePain]

The Who Dey and Who Dat chant both started in the 80's. There have been different years cited for the creation of both chants, but I've always been told that the Who Dey chant started a couple of years earlier.

[HoosierCat]

Once again, the (linguistically garbled) backstory from PaulBrownBengal, a.k.a. SuperCat, a.k.a. admin of bengalsjungle.com.

If you ever want an editor, Cat, drop me a line.

http://bengalsjungle.com/whodeyorigin.html

[jjakq27]

so the saints cheer "who dat?" now. never heard it before

The Saints have been one of the worst teams in the NFL during the last 25 years. With the exception of Jim Mora Sr.'s run in the 80's they have been worse than our beloved Bengals were during the dark ages. They have gotten very little exposure so the Who Dat thing has been a regional thing until this year.

My wife got upset when one of the talking heads (Costas?) used the Who Dat cheer last night. I had to explain the difference. She also thought they had ripped us off.

And the bengalsjungle webpage explains it about as well as I can remember.

[Stripes]

I've heard so many stories about how each chant came to be and who had it first... I'm inclined to assume every such tale is dripping with bias, and I don't really believe any of them. Could be both chants developed entirely independent of one another.