Students, fans gobble up Honey Badger T-shirts

The honey badger takes what he wants, but right now University students want his T-shirts.

The online collegiate clothing store Tiger District has seen an increasing number of LSU football fans searching for purple and gold honey badger T-shirts since it started making the shirt in September.

Tiger District's shirt portrays a smug honey badger cradling a football while striking the Heisman pose, with the phrase "Honey badger takes what he wants" printed on it. The shirt borrows from the YouTube video sensation that follows a determined honey badger running amok, killing snakes and other animals for food despite incurring various scrapes, bruises and poisonous bites.

Fans soon bestowed the title "Honey Badger" upon LSU football player Tyrann Mathieu, generally because he takes what he wants on the field, including tackles and interceptions.

Accounting sophomore Max Smith thinks people like the shirt largely because of its clever design as well as Mathieu's potential to win the Heisman Trophy.

"It pretty much sums up what Tyrann does on the field," Smith said. "People want that on their shirt."

Other businesses produced similar honey-badger-related shirts but violated NCAA rules by specifically associating their T-shirts with Mathieu.

"Player-specific shirts are a big no-no with the NCAA," said Jared Loftus, owner of Tiger District. "It's strictly prohibited to make money off of a player."

Loftus said Tiger District works to design clever and relevant clothing and developed the shirt to depict honey badger Internet sensation, not a specific football player.

"It was a big deal before anyone was using the term 'honey badger' for a football player at LSU," Loftus said. "It just made sense to put it out there."

Loftus explained the company originally planned to print two dozen of these shirts to see how they would sell. He failed to anticipate how popular the shirt would become.

"The next thing you know it turned into a much bigger deal than we could have ever imagined," Loftus said. "Every day we think it's going to die down it doesn't."

Since the shirt's creation, it has gotten nods from CBS, Sports Illustrated and ESPN, Loftus said.

"Those honey badger T-shirts floating around LSU's campus are easily the best in the sport right now," wrote ESPN's Edward Ashcoff in a recent ESPN.com article. "He really does take what he wants."

While Loftus anticipates similar shirts to emerge from various vendors, he believes Tiger District was the first in the market to establish a successful honey badger shirt.

This isn't the first example of clever shirts circulating through the University community.

Storyville's "Nick Saban is a douche" shirt exploded in popularity in 2007 as a result of the University of Alabama-LSU rivalry and LSU fans' dislike for Alabama head coach Nick Saban.

"That was before everyone and their mother had an anti-Saban shirt," said Storyville owner Josh Harvey.

The shirt bore the date "11.3.07," the date of first game between LSU and Alabama since Nick Saban jumped to the Crimson Tide. Many LSU fans wore the shirt to the game in Tuscaloosa, where the Tigers beat Alabama in a close 41-34 contest.

Harvey explained many popular Storyville shirts began as custom prints for specific customers that grew in popularity. In addition, various types of shirts are popular during different parts of the year, and location also factors into popularity of a shirt.

"It's a different kind of business during football season," Harvey said. "There's a different focus of what people want to buy."

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Contact Austen Krantz at akrantz@lsureveille.com