Bearkats

Elliott T. Bowers Stadium has held 14,000 for Sam Houston football since 1986, a bowl by Texas standards but one built for a program that has rarely stopped playing since 1912. War took two chunks out of the schedule, in each of the world wars, and the pandemic took a third in 2020.

The Bearkats, a name taken up in 1923, won an NAIA title in 1964 under Paul Pierce as co-champions with Concordia. Sam Houston had lost the national championship game to North Dakota State in both 2011 and 2012 before K.C. Keeler's team beat South Dakota State 23–21 in May 2021, the pandemic having pushed the final six months past its own season. Keeler had arrived in 2014 and stayed through that title and beyond, an unusually long tenure for a program that moved up to Conference USA and the FBS level in 2023.

Sam Houston played through the transition from small-college football to its current standing without changing its rivalry along the way. The Battle of the Piney Woods, against Stephen F. Austin, has outlasted every conference switch.

Orange and white have been the colours since the nickname itself, and the roll of NFL draftees — Josh McCown among the more recent, taken in 2002 — traces back through decades of a program that first took the field in 1912 and has kept doing so, gaps aside, ever since.