[1] Michigan student Louis Elbel wrote the song in 1898 after the football team's victory over the University of Chicago, which clinched an undefeated season and the Western Conference championship.

An abbreviated version of the song, based on its final refrain, is played at University of Michigan sporting events and functions.

[2][5] Singing "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight" after the game—then considered school's unofficial fight song[6]—Elbel felt the event should be "dignified by something more elevating for this was no ordinary victory.

[7] Three days later in Ann Arbor, the song was performed during a concert by United States Marine Band leader and "March King" John Philip Sousa.

Sousa held the song in high regard: "No one but a master of counterpoint could have conceived the splendid harmony that marks the composition throughout," the bandleader said.

[6][9] Both songs were popular, but with Michigan's reentry to the Western Conference in 1917, followed by an undefeated football season in 1918, "The Victors" was readopted permanently.

Jim Henriksen, another band alumnus, wrote "The Authorship of 'The Victors March'" paper covering the various theories about the similarities indicating that none would be proved to be true.

Many attendees will stand when it is played, sing along and clap in rhythm until the chorus when, at each repetition of the word "Hail!," they thrust their fists in the air.

[1] In 2014, the USA Today College Football Fan Index named "The Victors" the number one fight song,[2] but it fell to third place in 2015.

[19] Michigan alumnus and composer Charles D. Kountz gave an account that in 1905, John Philip Sousa told him that "The Victors" was "one of the nation's finest military marches and the best original college song" he had ever heard.