Who Dey vs Who Dat

In "honor" of the New Orleans Saints winning Super Bowl 44 this evening, I thought I might declare my indifference (other than the fact that I hate the damn Indianapolis professional football team) to either team really winning because neither are my own choice by berating the winning team on their theft of their now well-known chant.

As almost every football-interested person might know by tomorrow afternoon, the Saints have employed a chant something of the nature of "Who dat? Who dat? Who dat say dey gonna beat them Saints?" Leading up to this championship game, the saying has grown much notoriety within the football crowd and everyone now relates it to the Saints.

However, being a Cincinnati Bengals fan, I noticed an odd and annoying similarity between their "Who Dat" and the Bengal's chant of "Who Dey" which goes, "Who dey? who dey? Who dey think they gonna beat dem Bengals?!"

So being a curious little person as I am, I did some research as to who came up with it first, what it originated from and ultimately whether or not my Bengals or the now championship Saints are the thieves.

According to one source (Wikipedia, as it were, don't judge me), "The Who Dey chant's first known use was by fans of the 1980 Cincinnati Bengals. It is similar to the phrase "Who Dat?" used by the New Orleans Saints since 1983."

This discovery seems to put the Bengals as rightful owners of the chant, which put my mind to ease.

However, upon further research, I found that this is much disputed within the field of football history (no pun intended). Fan sites all over the web claim different explanations over which team thought of it first. Saints fans claim endearingly and whole-heatedly that they came up with it first, because the origination of both sayings comes from a 1930's jazz song "Who Dat?"

As I continued to search through forums and even articles from popular sports writers about the controversy, I realized that I obviously wasn't the first to figure out this interesting little history between the two teams. It seems as if the entry made in Wikipedia might have been made by a Cincinnati fan, but who knows. In all honesty, through everything I've looked through, I can't find a definite winner. Both teams claim to the death aht they came up with it.

From an English person's view, both versions of the saying should make my skin crawl, in that the colloquial utterance of the words "they" and "that" are immortalized in such a way that can make even the most educated person look like a slummy hick. And delving deeper, if I were to have to choose the one that was "most grammatically" correct out of the two (if even such a thing can be distinguished) it would have to be the "Who dat." Considering the agreement in the "sentence" "Who that" is I guess more appropriate that "Who they." It comes down to the fact that both are lacking key articles within it anyway.

Back to the thoughtless football fan I am, I think I'll stick to my "Who Dey" chats when the Bengals play. But I must agree with some of the posts that I read that stated seeing a Super Bowl with the Saints and Bengals would have been AMAZING. The papers would have headlines reading something like "Who Dey vs. Who Dat!" And the crowd in the stadium would no doubt have countless similar vocalization wars during the game. That would have been pretty awesome. Then again, we Cincinnati fans just want to see our team in the Super Bowl again (not that I have personally seen them, since their last appearance was when I was less than a month old).

So in all reality, I guess it doesn't matter who came up with it first, seeing as the fans will love the chants and their teams just as much.

But other teams beware, "Welcome to the Jungle" is Cinci's, so back off the Guns N Roses, son!