Courtesy of Randy Cummings, Denton Record-Chronicle

It's doubtful Sidney Sue Graham could have ever imagined the day her enthusiastic, unbridled cheering in the stands for the 1966 North Texas State University football team would evolve into one of college athletics' catchiest nicknames.

Sitting in the stands of Fouts Field with friends and the wives of NTSU's coaching staff, Graham merely was yelling support for the Eagles' defense -- at the time statistically one of the nation's top-ranked units -- while NTSU (now the University of North Texas) was trailing against Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso).

She knew her team, dressed in its home green-and-white uniforms, was better than the score indicated.

"We were way behind and she started hollering, 'Come on green, get mean,' or 'Here we go, mean green,' or variants on that," recalled Mark Graham, one of her three sons. "Then it became popular with some of the students and some of the other fans. So it caught on."

Graham, a longtime journalist who was a lifestyle editor for the Denton Record-Chronicle, quickly became proud of the "Mean Green" cheer she had inspired and thought it would be a good, albeit unofficial, nickname for the team's defense. So she proposed the idea of promoting the nickname to her husband, Fred Graham, who was the school's sports information director.

"The story I've always been told was that Dad said, 'That's way too corny,'" Mark recalled.

However, Fred decided to insert the nickname deep down in one of his weekly press releases about the team later that season. The media picked up on it, and the nickname soon found itself in print on a regular basis when stories referred to the team's defense in 1967. By 1968, it was used for the entire football team.

Over the years, the birth of the Mean Green moniker has been mistakenly linked to one of the era's star defensive players, Joe Greene. Graham always insisted she was yelling support for the defensive squad and came up with the phrase based on the school's primary color.

"Mom and Dad always said that she was referring, when she started that, to the North Texas defense at a game where they were losing to [Texas Western]," Mark said. "That's what they always told me.

"She always said it was never intended to be about Joe Greene," he added. "She would make a point of saying that Joe is not mean at all. [She'd say,] 'He's a great player, but he's as nice a guy as you'd ever want to meet.' So she was sensitive about that. She felt bad that he got that nickname and that she felt like it was her fault."

Actually, after Greene was drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers, it apparently was the NFL team's local media that launched his "Mean Joe Greene" nickname upon learning he played collegiately for the "Mean Green" Eagles.

The Mean Green label was primarily a secondary reference for the football team until Hayden Fry was hired as head coach and athletic director in 1973. He immediately embraced the distinctive nickname and promoted it as the team's main handle along with unveiling a new uniform color scheme -- lime green -- as well as a modernized eagle helmet logo.

While Sidney Graham always took pride in her role of creating the Mean Green nickname, she wasn't a fan of the brighter shade of green or the new logo -- often called the "flying worm" -- that the school featured throughout the 1970s.

"I remember when the flying worm came about, she wasn't real crazy about that," said Mark. "And she wasn't pleased about the lime green. After Dad passed [in 2009], we went to a few UNT games and she was so pleased later when they went back to the traditional green. That made her happy."

After Rick Villarreal was named athletic director in 2000, every UNT sports team took on the Mean Green nickname. Today, it's the university's trademarked nickname, while the eagle remains the official mascot.

Sidney Sue Graham died April 19, 2018, at the age of 83.