When the tubas and trombones of the UF Fightin' Gator Marching Band played during the first quarter at UF’s Sept. 5 game against Florida Atlantic, a crowd of eager Gator fans loudly welcomed the return of the infamous “Gator Bait” cheer.
After being retired six years ago for its possible connection to racist imagery, the “Gator Bait” cheer was revived this season to mixed reactions when UF announced its origin was unrelated.
The cheer, during which fans Gator Chomp while yelling “Gator Bait,” was a Gator football tradition for 24 years. It was coined in 1996 from a comment by former player Lawrence Wright, who yelled, “If you ain’t a Gator, you must be Gator Bait,” after the Gators won their first national championship.
But after the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, former UF President Kent Fuchs retired the chant as part of a wider effort to end racist practices at UF, which also included taking down or renaming monuments dedicated to Confederate leaders. He cited the cheer’s “horrific historic racist imagery” as the reason for ending it.
The cheer has since been likened to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art depicting Black children being fed to alligators as bait, and the phrase evolved into a slur against African Americans, according to ESPN.
At the time, former player Wright denounced the cheer’s discontinuation, saying it had nothing to do with the racist caricatures associated with the phrase and was solely related to football.
“I created something for us,” Wright said. “It’s not a racist thing. It’s about us, the Gator Nation.”
Steve Orlando, the UF interim vice president for communications and marketing, wrote in an email to The Alligator the cheer returned after the university concluded it was, in its context as a sports call, not racist.
It’s unclear which member of UF’s administration reinstated the chant.
The cheer returned again during the home game against the Campbell University Fighting Camels on Sept. 12.
Its original retirement came out of respect for the circumstances and increased scrutiny over outside origins, Orlando said, but it has a special place in Florida athletics, so it’s back to stay.
“We were pleased to hear this longstanding tradition return to The Swamp and look forward to hearing it at Gator games for years to come,” he wrote.
Kevin Winstead, a UF assistant African American studies professor who teaches about critical media and artificial intelligence, said meanings behind traditions naturally shift over time.
If UF consulted constituents and experts and came to its conclusion through research, he said, then he feels its decision to reinstate the cheer is sound.
“We have to come together and be very intentional in deciding what type of community we want to be in," he said.
In a June interview with 1010XL radio, UF President Stuart Bell said he was interested by the rise in discourse over the cheer. “Traditions matter,” he said, and the debate gives fans the chance to understand its importance in The Swamp.
“It’s meaningful to the Gator family, and I hope we can have some really great conversations around that,” Bell said.
Bell, who became president in July, stated as a candidate he would not push “woke” efforts, such as diversity, equity and inclusion policies, at UF.
Jordan Costagliola, a 2025 UF journalism alumnus and former drum major for the Gator marching band, supported the ban.
Its return, Costagliola said, is disrespectful to those who trusted UF to make progressive change, and he found its revival distasteful because it didn’t come with a public statement from UF.
“That was supposed to be indicative of progress,” Costagliola said. ”[The ban] was something that maybe confused people, but we didn’t just do that for no reason.”
But other Gator fans share more positive reactions to the chant’s return. Matt Smith, a Gainesville native and lifelong Gator football fan, said the cheer itself has no connection to racism.
He pointed to the large percentage of Black players and the cheer’s creator, Wright. It would be hypocritical to use the cheer to support a majority-Black team if it was intended to be racist, he said.
“It has no racial divide,” Smith said. “We’re literally just doing [it] because we’re Gator. You’re gator bait: You’re [an] opposing team.”
UF’s Black Student Union and the UF Fightin' Gator Marching Band declined to comment.
Contact Sofia Garcia at sofiagarcia@alligator.org. Follow her on X at @sconsuelogarcia.
Sofia Garcia is a first-year journalism and political science double major at UF and serving as the student government reporter for Fall 2026. This is her first semester at The Alligator. In her free time, she enjoys listening to music, playing video games, or connecting with her friends and family back home in Miami.
