The Big 5’s Streamers Have Outlived Their Original Home

The old Big 5 celebration began with a basket and ended, briefly, with a floor no one could play on.

When a team scored its first points at the Palestra, fans sent streamers in school colors toward the court. The paper made a basketball game stop almost as soon as it had started. It also made the occasion unmistakable: this was not simply a home team receiving its usual welcome, but one Philadelphia school meeting another before a crowd that understood the rivalries.

illustration for The Big 5’s Streamers Have Outlived Their Original Home.

The pause was part of the custom, though it eventually became its problem. Officials needed a clear, safe playing surface. Fans wanted their moment. Over time, the streamer toss became a small test of what the Big 5 was willing to keep—and what coaches, players and referees were willing to accommodate to keep it.

That question has followed the tradition beyond the Palestra. The men’s Big 5 Classic now plays its championship tripleheader in a larger arena, under a format different from the old round robin. Drexel has joined the five founding schools. Yet streamers have appeared there, too. And on December 6, 2026, the women’s Big 5 Classic is scheduled to return to the Palestra for a tripleheader during the building’s centennial season. Penn’s announcement does not say whether anyone will throw a streamer that day. The planned return nevertheless brings the Big 5 back to the place where a first basket once prompted fans to cover the floor in their colors.

The Big 5 itself was a deliberate arrangement, not a rivalry that somehow organized itself. On November 23, 1954, Penn president Gaylord Harnwell announced an informal association among Penn, La Salle, Saint Joseph’s, Temple and Villanova. The first Big 5 doubleheader was played at Penn’s Houston Hall that year. In 1955, the series held its first doubleheader at the Palestra.

The building became the association’s shared stage. In the Big 5’s heyday, games there were often double- or tripleheaders. The schools divided ticket and concession revenue after reimbursing Penn for the arena’s upkeep and operating costs. They remained separate programs with their own ambitions, but the arrangement gave their meetings a common address.

That mattered to the streamer toss. A team’s first points are ordinarily a minor step in a long game. At the Palestra, they could produce a visible response from its supporters, followed by the practical work of making the court playable again. The custom did not require a championship, an upset or even a close score. Each side got its chance at the start, when the outcome was still unknown.

No established account identifies the first fan to throw a streamer or the first game in which one landed. Penn’s history says the practice grew with the Big 5, and the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia places it among the Palestra’s established traditions. Its appeal is easier to understand than its precise origin. The streamers gave rival crowds a way to announce themselves inside a building they shared.

But the court was shared, too, and only until the next play. Paper on the playing surface required a stoppage. As the practice spread beyond the Big 5, the concern became broader than streamers. Penn’s retrospective says schools elsewhere copied the toss and that heavier, more dangerous objects began to fly along with paper. Penn dates the NCAA response to about 1985; a Daily Pennsylvanian account also places the crackdown in 1985, while some later coverage describes the ban as taking hold in the early 1990s. The accounts do not establish one neat date on which the tradition ended. They do establish the consequence that shaped its future: throwing objects could bring a technical foul.

There is an important distinction in that history. The safety concern was not simply that a strip of paper was dangerous. Objects thrown onto a basketball court posed a larger problem, and officials could not treat a game’s playing surface as a place where fans were free to deposit whatever they chose. At the same time, Big 5 supporters did not regard the first-basket toss as an ordinary disruption. What looked to one side like an avoidable interruption looked to the other like a piece of the game’s identity.

A rule could make the toss costly. It could not make the attachment to it disappear.

The surviving accounts record revivals for special occasions in 1994 and 2006. They do not provide a complete list of every game in between. By December 6, 2014, when Temple played La Salle at the Palestra, the act was familiar enough to be described as a return. It was also unusual enough that what happened after the first baskets became part of the story.

Fans threw streamers after each team scored its first basket. Officials assessed technical fouls. The coaches had prepared a response: they told players to step over the line on the resulting free throws, making the attempts invalid. The officials enforced the penalty; the teams declined to gain points from it. Temple won 58–57, a result close enough to invite scrutiny of every possession, but the reported facts do not make the streamer arrangement the explanation for the score.

The workaround was revealing anyway. It did not erase the rule or ask referees to ignore what had landed on the floor. Instead, the coaches found a way for the technicals to be called without allowing either team’s supporters to give the opponent a scoring advantage through the celebration. For a moment, the game’s formal penalty and its local custom occupied the same court.

The setting made that moment more than a novelty. Temple and La Salle were playing at the Palestra as an exception to a wider shift toward schools hosting Big 5 games in their own arenas. Those home games had value; giving them up was not an easy request. But the move changed the experience of a series long associated with one shared venue.

After the 2014 game, La Salle coach John Giannini urged more Big 5 games to return to the Palestra, arguing that schools would have to surrender some home-court advantage to preserve that common setting. The streamers could not settle the debate over schedules or arenas. They did show what was at stake in it. The toss belonged to a version of the Big 5 in which the building itself helped define the occasion.

Then the association changed again. In 2023, Drexel became its sixth member. The men’s competition moved from the former round robin to pod play and a concluding tripleheader, the Big 5 Classic. That event was held at the Wells Fargo Center, now Xfinity Mobile Arena, rather than the Palestra.

The new arrangement gave the series a championship event and a new member, but it did not recreate the old Big 5 under a different name. With six teams and pod play, each school no longer met every other school in the same way. With the Classic at a larger arena, the association’s culminating games no longer depended on the Palestra. A tradition tied to the old building had to stand on its own if it was going to travel.

It did. Before the inaugural Classic on December 2, 2023, coaches told officials they would not shoot technical free throws if streamers brought technical fouls, according to Washington Post columnist John Feinstein. The agreement recalled the 2014 solution, but the backdrop had changed. The toss was no longer marking a return to a familiar arena. It was carrying a familiar Big 5 gesture into a new one.

Drexel’s part in that first Classic made the change especially clear. In the fifth-place game, the Dragons beat No. 18 Villanova 57–55 for their first Big 5 win. After Amari Williams’ decisive late block, yellow-and-blue streamers flew in celebration. It was a different moment from the traditional first-basket toss, but it used the same unmistakable language: school colors in the air, a basketball result made visible across the arena.

For decades, Drexel had not been one of the five schools named in the association. Now its colors were part of a Big 5 streamer scene. The custom had moved well beyond its original setting without losing its ability to identify who was taking part. At the December 2024 Classic, reports again described fans throwing streamers after teams’ first baskets. The 2023 display was not the last appearance of the practice in the new format.

None of this means the changes are merely cosmetic. A tripleheader in a major arena is not a run of doubleheaders at the Palestra. Adding Drexel altered the membership; pod play altered the competition. The streamer toss cannot restore the old schedule or turn a new venue into the old one. Its persistence says something narrower, and perhaps more interesting: even as the Big 5’s structure changed, people involved in its games kept finding ways to make room for this particular expression of it.

That room has always been conditional. The floor still has to be cleared. Officials still have rules to enforce. Coaches cannot guarantee that every future game will handle a technical foul as another did. The tradition has survived not because those concerns vanished, but because the people around it have repeatedly treated the celebration as worth working through them.

The women’s Classic scheduled for the Palestra on December 6 will bring the revised Big 5 format into the arena so closely associated with the original series. It is set to be a centennial-season event, not a reconstruction of the Big 5 as it stood decades ago. Whether streamers are part of the day remains an open question.

The paper, when it appears, lasts only until someone clears it from the court. The choice to throw it has lasted much longer. At the Palestra, at another arena and across changes in membership and format, the Big 5’s streamer tradition has kept asking the same practical question: how much space can a basketball game make for the people and customs that make it feel like this one?