Graduation tradition unmasks students who play Brutus

“Hey, you’re the girl Brutus.”

Emily Hayward ’25, the fourth female Brutus, heard this several times during 2025 graduation ceremonies after the video she’d posted a few days earlier went viral. In the post, she dances out of the ’Shoe as Brutus and then, cut to … Hayward wearing the scarlet-and-gray striped Brutus shirt under her gown, holding the Brutus cap.

“A few people asked to take pictures with me at graduation, which was surreal,” Hayward says. “I was used to taking pictures as Brutus, but now people were asking to take pictures with Emily.”

The identity of the Bruti (there’s an undisclosed number of students who play our mascot every year) is a closely guarded secret. “Only a close circle of people knew I was Brutus,” says Hayward, who now works for Johnson & Johnson in Pittsburgh.

She’s part of an overall Brutus tradition that dates back to 1965—and a new graduation-reveal tradition. It began in 2017 when Alan Babinec ’17
and Michael George ’17 wore the ballcaps from their official Brutus uniforms on top of their graduation caps as a way to proclaim to the world their Brutus-ness. (They had permission!)

“Being Brutus is so locked in secrecy,” says George, VP of business operations at Titans Packaging in Cincinnati. “Alan and I were getting jealous of some of the other mascots.” Sparty, from one of those teams up north, wears his Spartan boots under his graduation robe, and Goldie Gopher from Minnesota wears his tail on the big day. “Alan and I wanted to do something clever to show the person behind the mask, and so we came up with the idea of wearing our Brutus cap on top of our graduation cap.”

All subsequent Bruti have worn the cap on top of their cap at graduation.

Hayward’s video took the reveal to a new level. It has more than 7 million views on TikTok. “Keeping the secret could be hard at times,” she says, “but it was important and keeps the magic of Brutus alive.”