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 my family and my roommate knew I was Brutus,” says Hayward, a biomedical engineering major who took a job with Johnson & Johnson in Pittsburgh.

She’s part of the 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, vice president of business operations at Titans Packaging in Cincinnati. When friends asked why they never saw him at football games, “I’d tell them I was a chronically injured cheerleader. And when I’d walk through the Student Union with the big black bag [containing his Brutus attire], I’d tell people it was laundry. Maybe some people figured it out, but they didn’t press me too hard.”

Taking his turn as Brutus at football games was a highlight of George’s three-year Brutus stint. “But it’s the more personal things I remember even more,” he says. “I was at a fundraiser for Nationwide Children’s Hospital and met an 11-year-old who beat cancer twice. He told me he named his cancer ‘Michigan’ because he beat it twice. 

“I’m this silly, fluffy nut who people use to help beat cancer.”

George and Babinec were friends with several other famed mascots from around the country. And they were a bit jealous. Sparty, from one of those teams up north, gets to wear 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,” George says.

The idea caught on, and all subsequent Bruti have worn the cap on top of their cap at graduation.

Being Brutus is a Steyn family tradition. First there was Alastair “Sudzy” Steyn ’15, then Trevor Steyn ’17, ’19 and Patrick Steyn ’21, ’23. “It was difficult to keep it secret,” Patrick says. “You do all this cool stuff; I crowd-surfed with Jack Harlow [a well-known rapper/singer] on ‘College Game Day’ and did a backflip in front of 110,000 people, and nobody knew it was me.”

At his graduation, Patrick wore the Brutus shirt under his gown and the cap on his cap. “You’d be surprised by the lack of attention it got,” says Steyn, who works in the technology field in San Francisco. “People were busy with graduation and didn’t really pay attention, and a couple people just thought it was a really cool idea and didn’t realize” it meant he had been Brutus.

The cap reveal has gained more attention with each and every graduation ceremony. “And then Emily’s video really blew it out of the water,” Patrick says.

Hayward’s video 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 … The impact Brutus has on people, how he changes the energy in a room when he walks in, is amazing.”