Penn found itself at the center of controversy this weekend as a March Madness chant taunting Illinois was the target of a social media firestorm.
In the final minutes of Penn’s 105-70 NCAA tournament loss to Illinois, with no hope of the Quakers making a comeback, the Penn Band started up a chant: “That’s alright, that’s okay, you’re gonna work for us someday.” The video of the chant has circulated the internet as a viral moment, collecting over 4.2 million views on Yahoo Sports’ X as of publication. Comments on the post have mostly been negative, calling it an “elitist” instance of “bad sportsmanship.”
Even on campus, the video has been a topic of conversation, from Sidechat posts to my roommate asking me whether “they actually said that."
The Penn Band’s 2026 Executive Board has since posted a statement to its Instagram account addressing the incident.
“We’d like to specifically apologize to the University of Illinois’s players, faculty, students, and alumni — as representatives of a fellow collegiate institution, we recognize and respect the many contributions the University of Illinois has made to its community and society at large. We believe that individuals are not defined by institutional membership, and we recognize that the implications of our chant were misaligned with that belief.”
There has been a lot of attention for a chant that the Penn Band didn’t even create. Northwestern and Vanderbilt’s student sections have chanted the same line, according to social media posts dating back 15 years. Harvard University has also banned this chant from use by its student band, according to Wikipedia.
Does this mean that Thursday’s instance was okay? Not quite.
In the dying minutes of a game in which your school is down by 30 points, the chant comes across as an attempt of claiming some kind of high ground instead of accepting defeat by an objectively better team. As an Ivy League school, this fuels the already-prevalent image of our students being stuck-up and conceited.
Additionally, it takes away from the achievement of the men’s basketball team.
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Following last year’s coaching change, the team far surpassed expectations by winning the Ivy championship during coach Fran McCaffery’s first season, and thereby clinching a spot in March Madness for the first time since 2018. What should be remembered is the euphoria surrounding this feat and the heart the Quakers played with on Thursday night, regardless of their loss. Instead, one video showcasing an ill-timed chant took the spotlight and is what people are still talking about days after.
That’s not to say that chants, even the more brazen ones, should be stopped entirely. These days, Penn’s rivalries have lost some of their fire. It’s questionable how many Penn students are able to name our school’s biggest basketball rival (it’s Princeton). Although the game against the Tigers boasted the highest home attendance this season, a large number of those attendees were alumni rather than students.
An array of historical rivalries comes within Philadelphia’s Big 5, with the Battle of 33rd Street between Penn and Drexel being the closest geographical rivalry in NCAA Division I sports. Yet, I doubt many Penn students could point you towards the Daskalakis Athletic Center, the site of this year’s game, let alone name all six Big 5 teams — or even point out the irony that there are six teams instead of five.
Having been at some of the men's and women's rivalry games this season, it is hard to deny the impact university bands have on the atmosphere of those rivalry matchups. Besides playing some of their most recognizable songs, the Big 5 has a tradition of its students or bands coming to games prepared with rollouts: quippy, tongue-in-cheek insults at the other team’s mascot or fans, written on parchment paper and rolled out at specific points during the game.
Examples from this season include “Who wants to cheer for a Quaker when you could cheer for a Dragon?” by the Drexel Pep Band at the women’s basketball game, and the Penn Band’s “That hawk will never fly!!” when the St. Joe’s Hawks brought their mascot to their women’s basketball game at the Palestra. At the Big 5, Villanova fans even took it a bit further, revealing a “Remember when you were a basketball school?” rollout.
In addition to their history, what makes these rollouts acceptable is the thought that goes into creating them. Students spend time considering possible insults, and, perhaps even more importantly, debating which ones would go too far. The now-infamous chant on Thursday night appears to have lacked that very thought process.
While creative, specific chirps during historical rivalry games may occasionally feel personal, they add the emotion some of these games have lacked. University bands like the Penn Band play a significant role in carrying the spirit of the student section, especially during breaks in play at basketball games. While the outrage over Thursday’s chant was justified, it was an isolated incident and should not impact unconnected, cherished Penn Band traditions.
As per Penn Band’s statement, the 2026 Executive Board commits itself to “reevaluating the Penn Band’s gameday cheers to ensure they properly reflect our mission and positively support Penn Athletics and the greater Penn community.”
This will certainly help to ensure that the next time anything related to Penn sports goes viral, it will be because of an outstanding athletic performance — or maybe an especially creative rollout.
