Mocs

Davenport Field sits inside Finley Stadium, a 20,412-seat ground the Mocs share with the city of Chattanooga rather than keep to themselves, and it has been the program's home since the university's football side first took the field in 1904. Blue, gold and grey have marked the team through that whole span, and the nickname itself comes from Moccasin Bend, the stretch of the Tennessee River that loops around the city — a name that also lent itself, by way of the mockingbird, to the mascot the players now call Scrappy Moc.

For thirty-seven years, from 1931 to 1967, A.C. "Scrappy" Moore ran the program, a tenure long enough to carry Chattanooga through three different conferences and into the College Football Hall of Fame on his own account. The championships came in clusters under different names — the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association in the late 1920s, the Dixie Conference around 1940, then the Southern Conference twice over, first in the late 1970s and again in the mid-2010s, when the Mocs also reached the FCS quarterfinals in 2014 and the second round the following year.

Terrell Owens played his college ball here between 1992 and 1995, before the Hall of Fame career that followed, and he still holds the school's receiving records. Cole Strange went further up the draft board than any Moc before him, taken 29th overall by the New England Patriots in 2022.

None of that carries the weight, locally, of the game against East Tennessee State. The Railroad Trophy has gone back and forth between the two schools long enough that the rivalry has its own name, the Rail Rivalry, and for one Saturday a year the conference table goes out of the window.