Columbia, South Carolina · Founded 1870 · Tigers
“A woman-founded HBCU on a 110-acre former plantation in Columbia whose Tigers went from a revived football program to back-to-back SIAC championships — and whose Band of Distinction marched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.”
The BCBOD's own media team captures the band's soulful R&B side — Monica's classic arranged by assistant director Ronald T. Green, the sound that keeps alumni coming back.
The ultimate HBCU band anthem — Cameo's 'Talkin' Out the Side of Your Neck' — tearing up the stands under the new Brendan Johnson era, low brass leading the charge.
The BCBOD turns up the field with Yung Miami's 'Spend Dat' — precision, choreography and full Tiger energy from the 2026 season.
The full homecoming halftime show — the crown jewel of Benedict's fall, with the alumni crowd expecting songs from every era of the band's history.
The first statement of the Brendan Johnson comeback era — the 'Bold New Era of the Ultimate Halftime Experience' against Florida State in the Labor Day Classic.
BCBOD halftime against Tuskegee — the rematch energy of the 2022 SIAC title game rivalry, played out in the stands and on the field.
Benedict's field show at the Big HBCU Battle of the Bands, holding its own against the biggest DII and FCS programs in the country.
Full-event film of the 2026 Big HBCU Battle of the Bands — Benedict's Marching Band of Distinction takes the field at 53:44, between Albany State and South Carolina State.
The in-state band rivalry at its rawest — BCBOD vs. South Carolina State's Marching 101 in the 'Ultimate 5th Quarter Experience' at Dillon, a showdown still passed around by band heads.
The Band of Distinction in its prime H. Wade Johnson years at Dillon — the era that carried Benedict to No. 1 in the ESPN/The Undefeated DII rankings.
The 2024 Gospel Show — the BCBOD's praise-and-worship side, a halftime tradition that hits different in a Baptist-founded school.
A style-clash showcase pitting Benedict's HBCU flair against the University of North Alabama's corps-style Pride of Dixie — the culture debate in one video.
Class of 1921 — leader of African American public-health reform and the civil rights movement in South Carolina; one of the state's most consequential activists.
Class of 1930 — lawyer and judge; the first Black justice on the New York Court of Appeals.
Negro league baseball star who hit .428 over six seasons — one of the highest career averages in the game's history.
Former chairman of the United States Olympic Committee — the first Black person to lead the USOC.
Class of 1970 — former County Executive of Prince George's County, Maryland, one of the nation's most prominent Black county leaders.
Television and film actor with a decades-long career on screen.
Class of 1961 — professional basketball player who became a senior vice president at Kentucky Fried Chicken.
The first African American woman to publish a novel in South Carolina.
The first African American physician in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Class of 1879 — president of Selma University and of Simmons College of Kentucky.
Class of 1945 — Anglican bishop; the first Black bishop in the Reformed Episcopal Church.
Class of 1885 — teacher and writer.
Basketball player who went on to play with the Harlem Globetrotters.
Class of 2009 — professional basketball player.
Professional streetball player.
On December 12, 1870, Benedict Institute opened on a 110-acre former plantation in Columbia, South Carolina. Bathsheba A. Benedict of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, acting through the American Baptist Home Mission Society, put up $13,000 to buy the land — one of many northern mission-society schools planted in the South for the newly emancipated. The first class was ten freedmen and one teacher: the Reverend Timothy L. Dodge, a college-trained preacher from the North, who doubled as the institute's first president. Classes met in the plantation's dilapidated Big House, built in 1839, where grammar-school reading, writing and math sat beside Bible and theology — the point was to train teachers and preachers, men and women who would be, in the school's founding phrase, powers for good in society.
Timothy L. Dodge led the institute through its first five years, setting the pattern of northern white Baptist ministers running the school — seven in all between 1870 and 1930, every one of them college-trained. Lewis Colby (1876–1879) and E. J. Goodspeed (1879–1882) followed, keeping a tiny school afloat in the violent Reconstruction and Redemption-era South, when educating Black people was still treated by many whites as provocation. The curriculum stayed humble — grammar school subjects first, then theology — because so many of the students had been legally barred from learning to read or write before emancipation. It was a shoestring operation, and every year it survived was an act of stubbornness.
Charles E. Becker (1882–1895) and Abraham C. Osborn (1895–1911) gave Benedict its longest stretches of early stability, thirty years between them. Under Osborn the school started looking like a real college: in 1895 a $9,000 gift from the American Baptist Home Mission Society built Morgan Hall, named for the Society's executive secretary Thomas J. Morgan, who had pushed HBCUs to train Black architects, engineers, artists and master mechanics. Morgan Hall housed five presidents over the next seventy years and still stands as the visual signature of the campus. Grants from the John F. Slater Fund for the education of freedmen helped keep the doors open through the lean decades.
On November 2, 1894, the South Carolina Legislature chartered the institution as a four-year liberal arts college and the name changed from Benedict Institute to Benedict College. The charter mattered: it moved the school beyond its mission-school roots into degree-granting status at a time when most Black institutions in the South were being starved or redirected into industrial education only. Benedict was still small and still poor, but it was now legally a college, with the freedom to build a real liberal-arts curriculum.
Between 1895 and 1937 Benedict built the five buildings that now form its National Register Historic District. After Morgan Hall (1895) came Pratt Hall (1902), Duckett Hall (1925), Antisdel Chapel (1932) and the Starks Center (1937) — Classical Revival brickwork that gave the school a permanent, dignified face in Jim Crow Columbia. The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987. Those buildings still anchor the campus today, and Morgan Hall now houses the Division of Institutional Advancement, welcoming the Columbia community daily.
On April 10, 1930, the Reverend John J. Starks became Benedict's first African American president — and he was one of their own, a member of the class of 1891. After sixty years under seven northern white ministers, the school was finally led by a Black alumnus who had come up through its own classrooms. Starks led through the Depression and World War II until 1944, and the Starks Center, completed in 1937, carries his name. Five African American presidents have succeeded him, a line that runs unbroken to today.
Benedict became a member of the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference in the 1932–33 academic year, tying its athletic fate to the great Black college conference of the South — the same year its Antisdel Chapel was completed. The Tigers have been in the SIAC ever since, with one detour: from 1988–89 to 2001–02 the school held dual NCAA and NAIA membership, competing in the NAIA's Eastern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference while staying in the SIAC. It has been back to straight NCAA Division II competition since.
John A. Bacoats took office in 1944 and stayed until 1965, the longest presidency in school history at the time. He steered Benedict through the postwar years and the first waves of the civil rights movement, building the school's academic standing as Black college enrollment surged across the South. Bacoats Hall was named for him. When he stepped down, T. J. Hanberry served as acting president (1965–1967) before Benjamin F. Payton — who would later lead Tuskegee University for nearly three decades — arrived in 1967.
On March 14, 1960, inspired by Greensboro, two students — Simon Bouie of Allen University and Talmadge Neal of Benedict College — led a march to the Eckerd's luncheonette on Main Street, sat down, were refused service because of their race, refused to leave, and were jailed and convicted. The next day, March 15, five more Benedict students — Charles Barr, David Carter, Richard Counts, Milton Greene and Johnny Clark — refused to leave the lunch counter at the Taylor Street Pharmacy and were arrested. Governor Ernest Hollings had warned Benedict and Allen students days earlier that they would be arrested for protesting, and the presidents of both colleges publicly opposed the sit-in campaign — but the students went anyway, with Columbia attorney Matthew J. Perry as their lawyer.
In 1964 the United States Supreme Court decided Barr v. City of Columbia and Bouie v. City of Columbia, ruling that the lower courts had denied the students due process under the 14th Amendment and overturning their convictions. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which finally outlawed segregation in public accommodations, was enacted ten days after the Barr decision. The marches and arrests that started at lunch counters a short walk from Benedict's campus had helped force federal law. On October 25, 2024 — sixty-four years later — a Columbia judge signed an order in a courthouse ceremony erasing the arrest records of Bouie and his fellow protesters, with Bouie in attendance.
Benedict's band goes back to the 1960s, when student director and music major Freddie Gallman led it, followed by Charles Alston and then Roy McCullough. Under McCullough the band was known as the Tiger Band, and its signature moment came in 1968 when it marched in the Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans — a big stage for a small DII program. The marching band then went on a brief hiatus along with the college's football program, performing only at basketball games during the quiet years. The seeds of today's powerhouse were already planted: a band with pride bigger than its roster.
Henry Ponder led Benedict from 1973 to 1984, navigating the difficult 1970s when small private Black colleges faced enrollment and funding pressure from every direction. He kept the school growing and stable, and when he left he went on to become president of Fisk University (1984–1996) — one of the few HBCU presidents to lead two historic Black colleges. An interim year under Betty S. Shearin (1984–1985) bridged to Marshall C. Grigsby (1985–1993), with Ruby W. Watts serving as interim in 1993–1994. The turnover of the early 1990s set the stage for the most transformative hire in modern Benedict history.
The Benedict College Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 20, 1987 — five Classical Revival buildings constructed between 1895 and 1937, designed with the hand of architect James B. Urquhart. The designation recognized what alumni already knew: this small campus held some of the most intact turn-of-the-century HBCU architecture in the South. The National Park Service later put real money behind that recognition, awarding the college preservation funds to protect Morgan Hall — the 1895 building that had housed five presidents — as a site of African American civil rights history, with the explicit goal of stopping water infiltration and restoring its nearly fifty windows.
David H. Swinton arrived in 1994 and immediately set an audacious public goal: 2,000 students enrolled by the year 2000. Benedict hit it four years early — 2,138 students in 1996 — and reached 3,000 by fall 2002, becoming one of the fastest-growing schools in the 39-member United Negro College Fund. Among South Carolina's twenty independent colleges, Benedict came to hold the largest undergraduate enrollment and the second-largest overall. Swinton stayed twenty-three years (1994–2017), the longest continuous presidency in the school's history, and the campus was physically transformed around the growth: new residence halls, a parking garage, a campus center and dining hall, an administration building and a business development center, plus three purchased apartment complexes for student housing.
In 1995 Benedict reinstated its football program after a hiatus of roughly three decades — the game had been gone so long that an entire generation of alumni had never seen a Tiger team take the field. Swinton framed the revival as a way for students to feel a community esprit de corps and to lift the spirit and quality of the school. Football's return also forced the rebirth of the marching band, which came back to the field alongside the team with new uniforms and new energy. The school bought and built toward the future: within a decade the Tigers would have their own on-campus stadium, and within three decades they would be national champions of Black college football below the Division I level.
In August 1998 the reborn Tiger Band transformed into the Marching Tiger Band of Distinction under Dr. Sean E. Daniels, who had taken over the program in 1997 — when, by his own account, his first football game featured a drum and bugle corps and the president had to summon him to say he was hired to run a marching band. About thirty-plus members laid the foundation that year, changing the marching style, drill and music completely; by homecoming the band was marching for real. The first year roster was 61 members; it would grow to 165 and become one of the most prominent sounds in the Southeast. Students and alumni call the band an organism rather than an organization — because, in their words, it never dies.
Benedict built its own on-campus home for football: the 11,000-seat Charlie W. Johnson Stadium, opened in 2006 as the centerpiece of a multimillion-dollar sports complex that also brought tennis courts, baseball fields, fitness facilities and a running track. Named for the longtime board leader Charlie W. Johnson, the stadium ended the era of playing in borrowed or makeshift facilities and gave the Tigers a true home field in the heart of Columbia. The school's own student paper noted the new stadium was already generating a business corridor around it. The band's growth kept pace — in 2006 the BCBOD marched in the Universal Studios Florida Holiday Parade featuring Macy's and was voted the favorite band in the SIAC.
In June 2017 Dr. Roslyn Clark Artis became Benedict's fourteenth president and its first woman leader, arriving after serving as the first woman president of Florida Memorial University. She moved fast: Benedict became the first HBCU in decades to significantly cut tuition, dropping the cost of attendance by more than $6,000 a year while simultaneously raising admission standards — enrolling three high school valedictorians and improving retention. The results stacked up quickly: Benedict was named HBCU of the Year by the HBCU Awards, enrollment grew by 233 percent over her first seven years, the four-year graduation rate rose 5.4 points above the national average, and the college completed its five-year strategic plan, The B.E.S.T., in a record three years.
The Marching Tiger Band of Distinction celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2018, and the homecoming game against Morehouse that October was built around it — band director H. Wade Johnson and assistant Ronald Green crowdsourced song ideas from alumni of every era so the halftime show would speak to all twenty years at once. Johnson had taken over after the death of Herman Jones Jr. in 2016; Jones, who had built the band's distinctive sound, recommended Johnson before leaving on sabbatical to pursue his doctorate. The BCBOD performed at the 2018 Honda Battle of the Bands, and by 2021 ESPN's The Undefeated had ranked Benedict the No. 1 HBCU Division II marching band two months in a row — topping musicality, drum majors, drill design and percussion. The judges' categories told the story: this was a band built on craft, not hype.
The band program's depth showed beyond the field: in February the Benedict Jazz Ensemble traveled to Norfolk, Virginia, and competed against nine HBCU jazz ensembles for the chance to open for Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra — Benedict and Norfolk State won, judged by Marsalis and his musicians. In June 2023 directors H. Wade Johnson and Ronald Green were invited to the 21st annual Jazz at Lincoln Center Band Director's Academy in New York with full scholarships. Meanwhile the marching band held its No. 1 DII ranking through the 2021 season's final full month of halftimes. The BCBOD's dancers, the Sweet Sensation, had been a halftime fixture since at least the 2008 season.
Fall 2022 was the season every Benedict alum had waited for. Head coach Chennis Berry — hired in February 2020 after the Tigers went 1-9 in 2019, and sidelined by the COVID-cancelled 2020 season — took the team from 5-5 in 2021 to 11-0, winning the school's first SIAC football championship with a 58-21 demolition of Tuskegee at Charlie W. Johnson Stadium, quarterback Eric Phoenix leading the way. The Tigers earned the top seed in Super Region II and the first NCAA Division II playoff berth in school history, rose as high as No. 7 nationally, and claimed the black college national championship below the Division I level; Berry was named AFCA Division II Region 2 Coach of the Year. That same November the Marching Tiger Band of Distinction — chosen from more than 100 candidates as one of nine bands — marched in the 96th Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York, the band's biggest stage ever. NPR's photo essay that fall called Benedict an HBCU where students' dreams were rekindled, and noted the school had become the first HBCU to offer a gaming room and a degree in esports.
The Tigers did it again in 2023: 11-1, a second straight SIAC championship — this time a sound beating of Albany State — the nation's top defense in Division II for most of the season, and a second consecutive top seed in Super Region II before a second-round playoff loss to Lenoir-Rhyne. It was the program's high-water mark, and it cost Benedict its coach: in December 2023 Chennis Berry left to become head coach at South Carolina State, capping a 27-7 run in Columbia that had resurrected a program that went 1-9 four years earlier. The Benedict women added to the trophy case too, winning the 2023 SIAC basketball championship. The football program had to prove it could sustain excellence without its architect — the question that hangs over every Cinderella story.
On August 19, 2024, the board of trustees extended Dr. Roslyn Clark Artis's contract seven years, through June 2031, betting on the leader who had delivered the B.E.S.T. plan in three years and launched the follow-up B2: Focus on the F.U.T.U.R.E. (2023–2028) strategic plan. In July the United Negro College Fund honored Benedict with its Institutional Excellence Award for next-level performance. That same year the campuswide transformation initiative became real: with Siemens and MD Energy Advisors signed on — a collaboration that began in December 2021 — construction started in the spring to reimagine the campus's infrastructure, the biggest facilities push since the Swinton building boom. And on October 25, 2024, the sit-in generation got its due when a Columbia court expunged the 1960 arrest records of Simon Bouie and his fellow protesters, sixty-four years after Benedict students sat down at segregated lunch counters.
On June 11, 2025, Benedict announced Dr. Brendan L. Johnson as the new Director of Bands, with Garrick Rivers and Ronald T. Green as assistants — a deliberate push to restore the BCBOD to elite status. The move was honest about the moment: the same panel of SWAC, MEAC, CIAA and DII directors that had ranked Benedict No. 1 in 2021 had dropped the band out of the top 10 entirely by 2024, and the HBCU band world gives no passes for past glory. Johnson's arrival was framed as a bold new era, with the band's own media team — led by students like media coordinator Boris Williams — documenting every halftime under his baton. The 2025 season's Labor Day Classic show against Florida State was the first statement of the comeback.
The crosstown Columbia rivalry — two HBCUs a few blocks apart on the same street. It plays out as the Carolinas Football Classic, the Pepsi-sponsored weekend with the Mayor's Brunch, celebrity tailgates and both bands at Charlie W. Johnson Stadium; Benedict won the inaugural edition 45-12. Dr. Artis has publicly claimed a 56-year winning streak over Allen in football, a boast that says everything about how this rivalry feels on the Benedict side. It burns just as hot in basketball: the February 2023 women's game at C.A. Johnson High was standing-room-only, Benedict holding off Allen 73-66, and HBCU Gameday called it a rivalry that's great 'not just for the city but for the conference.' The 1960 sit-ins tied the schools together too — Allen's Simon Bouie and Benedict's Talmadge Neal were arrested side by side at Eckerd's.
Not a historic rivalry, but the defining modern matchup: the 2022 SIAC championship at Charlie W. Johnson Stadium, where Benedict — playing for its first conference title ever — dismantled Tuskegee 58-21, jumping to a 42-14 halftime lead behind Eric Phoenix's 313 passing yards. Tuskegee was the West Division champion and the establishment program; Benedict was the 11-0 upstart. The blowout announced that the Tigers weren't a one-season story.
The football programs rarely met — SCSU played up in the MEAC while Benedict rebuilt in DII — but the bands have gone at it for years, most visibly at the Dillon High School Battle of the Bands, where the 2019 BCBOD-vs-Marching 101 fifth-quarter showdown is still passed around on video. The rivalry got personal in December 2023 when Benedict's championship coach Chennis Berry left Columbia to take the South Carolina State head coaching job, turning admiration into a score to settle.
🥁 Marching Tiger Band of Distinction · since 1998
The Marching Tiger Band of Distinction — BCBOD — was reborn in August 1998 from about 30 members and grew from 61 in its first year to roughly 165, becoming one of the most prominent DII sounds in the Southeast. Students and alumni call it an organism, not an organization, because it never dies. The band peaked nationally in 2021 as ESPN/The Undefeated's No. 1 HBCU Division II band, then marched the 96th Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2022 — its biggest stage ever. The dancers are the Sweet Sensation, a halftime fixture since at least 2008, and the program runs its own student media team documenting every show.
Student director and music major who led the original band in its earliest documented years.
Took over from Gallman and kept the program going through the mid-1960s.
Led the band as the 'Tiger Band'; its signature achievement was marching in the 1968 Mardi Gras Parade in New Orleans. The program later went on hiatus with football.
Brothers who directed the band through the early-90s rebuilding years before football's return.
Arrived in 1997 to find a drum and bugle corps; the president told him he'd been hired to build a marching band. In August 1998 he transformed the Tiger Band into the Marching Tiger Band of Distinction with about 30 founding members, changing the style, drill and music completely.
Credited with forging the band's unique sound; recommended H. Wade Johnson as his successor before leaving on sabbatical to pursue his doctorate at Temple University. Died in 2016.
Led the BCBOD through its national peak — ESPN/The Undefeated ranked Benedict the No. 1 HBCU Division II band two months running in 2021 — and its 2022 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade appearance. His jazz ensemble won the HBCU competition judged by Wynton Marsalis and opened for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.
Announced June 11, 2025, with assistants Garrick Rivers and Ronald T. Green, hired to engineer a comeback after the band fell out of the national top 10 by 2024. His first season opened with the Labor Day Classic show against Florida State.
Benedict carries the full Divine Nine. The Delta Sigma Theta chapter Gamma Upsilon, founded on campus in 1948, is documented back to the 1956 student paper The Tiger, which also references the Pyramid Club. Benedict's homecoming includes the classic coronation and yard traditions associated with NPHC life.
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Reinstating football after a thirty-year hiatus meant rebuilding the program's physical footprint — practice space, equipment, locker facilities — from nothing, part of the Swinton-era investment that treated athletics as enrollment and spirit strategy, not decoration.
By the time fall enrollment hit 3,000, the college had completed three new residence halls, a parking garage and a campus center/dining hall, and had purchased three apartment complexes for student housing — building its way out of a capacity crunch driven by the '2000 by the year 2000' plan's success.
The 11,000-seat on-campus stadium opened as the centerpiece of a multimillion-dollar sports complex with tennis courts, baseball fields, fitness facilities and a running track, giving the revived football program a permanent home and sparking new business development around the stadium corridor.
New construction during the Swinton boom added an Administration Building and a Business Development Center, plus the acquisition of buildings for a fitness center and the Division of Community Development/Center for Excellence — the administrative backbone for a school that had doubled in size.
The college announced plans for a four-story, 100-suite residence hall for nearly 400 students next to the football stadium — designed to end reliance on off-campus apartment complexes a 15-minute shuttle ride away, and on a vacant hotel that had failed fire-code inspection when used for housing in 2009.
Benedict opened a new studio complex for its radio and television stations — TV studio, radio studio, editing rooms, sound booth and offices — plus a hair salon, barber shop and nail salon in the Campus Center, renovated dormitories, and installed new heating and cooling systems across campus. President Swinton's line at the time: 'Students are at the center of everything we do, so we wanted to focus on improving the areas where they live.'
Through the NIH's South Carolina IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence — a $18.9 million, five-year award shared across 14 institutions — Benedict funded upgrades to its animal care facility, the only HBCU in South Carolina with USDA certification and NIH Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare assurance, under biology professor Samir Raychoudhury.
Benedict became the first HBCU to offer a dedicated gaming room and a degree in esports, a headline-grabbing move during the Artis era that NPR flagged alongside the football championship season — a small school betting early on where student culture was going.
The campuswide transformation initiative — a collaboration with Siemens and MD Energy Advisors first outlined in December 2021 — became reality with construction starting in the spring, the biggest facilities modernization push since the Swinton building boom, aimed at reimagining campus infrastructure for the B2 strategic plan era.
The college received additional NPS funding to preserve Morgan Hall (1895) as a site of African American civil rights history — repairing water infiltration, refurbishing its nearly fifty windows with period-correct weatherproofing, and protecting the building that housed five presidents and witnessed the sit-in era.
Thompson Hospitality's LuxeLife Dining designer Justin Kiaku — a North Carolina Central alumnus — led a full luxury renovation of Benedict's dining space, treating the student dining hall as a place of pride rather than a cafeteria, in the Thompson tradition of investing in HBCU campus experience.
As part of its community development goal, the college renovated more than fifty rundown properties in the adjacent Columbia neighborhood — one of the quietest and most consequential upgrades, tying the school's fate to the blocks around it rather than walling itself off.
Chennis Berry was head football coach from February 2020 to December 2023, taking the Tigers from 1-9 to back-to-back SIAC titles before leaving for South Carolina State; his successor was not verified from an opened source and is left out rather than guessed. The athletic department rides on the SIAC's oldest memberships — Benedict has been in the conference since 1932–33. The band staff is unusually deep for a DII program, with a dedicated student media team (media coordinator Boris Williams and crew) producing its performance content.
In office since June 2017; first woman president; contract runs through June 2031. Elected Vice Chair of the SACSCOC Board of Trustees effective December 2025.
Longtime board leader and stadium namesake; the face of trustee backing for the Artis-era transformation.
Hired June 2025 to lead the Marching Tiger Band of Distinction's comeback, with assistants Garrick Rivers and Ronald T. Green.
Longtime arranger and co-architect of the BCBOD sound; invited with H. Wade Johnson to the 2023 Jazz at Lincoln Center Band Director's Academy.
Leads Benedict's biomedical research program and the USDA-certified animal care facility — the only one of its kind at a South Carolina HBCU.
Led the choir for more than twenty years, building its reputation at spirituals festivals and the annual Christmas concert.
Benedict feels like a small school with a big-school heartbeat. The campus sits within walking distance of downtown Columbia, and homecoming takes over Sumter Street with a parade the whole city watches — cheerleaders performing on the pavement, alumni posing for selfies, future Tigers with lollipops on the curb. The 1956 student paper shows a campus that was already steeped in coronations, choirs and Greek life; the 2022 NPR photo essay shows the same rituals in purple and gold, with the alma mater's last line still sung loud: 'Alma mater, strong and true, Alma mater ever! Benedict, we sing to you. Faithful we, forever.' Football's 2022–2023 championship run turned fall Saturdays at Charlie W. Johnson Stadium into the center of student life.