This week the NFL defended its ownership of the nearly century-old "Who Dat?" phrase, which was invented at the turn of the century by the then-unincorporated league.

"The founding body of people that would later start the NFL spent almost twenty years in the early 1900s attempting to come up with possible phrases that could be rallying chants for the teams of the future," said one sports historian. "Now they get one of those phrases to turn out some value, really gain some popularity, and there are bum pirates trying to make a buck off of it."

Claims that the phrase has been used before (and others curious about its possibly controversial origin) have been rebuked by the NFL.

"Of course it's been around a century," said an NFL representative, who commented on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal from The Whodat Nation, a radical group who is illegally using the phrase without the NFL's expressed written consent. "We knew the Saints were an expansion team, so we didn't have any use for the phrase until at least another six decades. We licensed it to a few stage performers until the New Orleans team was incorporated in 1967."

Fans may feel betrayed by what they percieve as the league's vicious intellectual property enforcement, but with the their intense investments in creating the phrases used to describe teams, players, and groups of players, it's easy to side with the NFL's defense.

"You can't comprehend the work it took for this company to come up with all those rally phrases between 1900 and 1920, before the Football League even existed," the NFL rep continued. "Doomsday Defense, Fearsome Foursome, Orange Crush, Steel Curtain...those represent WEEKS of sweat and debate, a room full of men attempting to contemplate what could happen in the next century of 'football,' a game we weren't sure--at that time--was going to succeed."

He wondered how the fans could be so short sighted. "People just get greedy, I guess," he shook his head. "It's easy for them to forget who got this League where it is today.