Why Your Fraternity Sucks: Sigma Pi

Dan Regester7 years ago

Some people are brothers of Sigma Pi. But many, many more people are NOT brothers of Sigma Pi. This TFM rush preview is for those in the latter group.

Fraternity: Sigma Pi

Like an inner city kid born into a single mother home in the midst of poverty overflowing with narcotics and gang violence, not much was expected of Sigma Pi from the jump. In fact, the fraternity merely being alive today after 119 rocky years may be their single biggest accomplishment to date.

Almost half of all the organization’s chapters are currently inactive, the alpha charter was founded at a community college, they ripped off the same color scheme and mascot of a fraternity that was established 50 years earlier, and their entire history is stained with lies. Do I really have to continue?

They seemingly have more core values, expectations, and obligations for brothers than actual members, a notable alumni list comparable to the amount of Tampa Bay Rays in the baseball Hall of Fame, and the modern day national presence of the electoral ticket for the Whig party.

You have to think it’s tough to recruit when your first major hazing controversy in over a century barely gets more than a yawn from the rest of the country. If tossing pledges in hot sauce and keeping them in puke filled cages in front of duct tape swastikas can’t get eyeballs on your letters, nothing will. Not that exposure really matters when the general population can’t decipher between the Greek letter Pi and a lower case n. You had too much faith in our public education system, Sigma Pi, and now that cute girl from Biology class you invited over for Thirsty Thursday is getting stuffed at the Sigma Nu house.

Size: 124 active chapters, 98 inactive

Never a good thing when your chapter’s odds of keeping the doors open is giving the U.S. divorce rate a run for its money solely from lack of interest.

Founded: 1752, 1897, but really 1907

Sigma Pi credits Rolin Rosco James, James Thompson Kingsbury, George Martin Patterson, and William Raper Kennedy as its founding fathers in 1897. No, that was not a typo. One of the men that laid the foundation for this fine fraternity had the middle name Raper.

Originally under the letters Tau Phi Delta, the literary society turned fraternity (when is that not the case) struggled to expand from glorified JUCO Vincennes University. It wasn’t until a kid by the name of Robert George Patterson at Ohio State completely fabricated a 150 year old fraternity into existence out of thin air in 1907 that Tau Phi Delta decided to merge with and take the letters of the nonexistent brotherhood.

This dude Patterson was a straight up snake oil salesman of loneliness that convinced these schmucks on the narrative that Sigma Pi was one of the oldest and most influential Greek groups of their time, chock-full of American political figure alumni like James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and William Jennings Bryan who — by the way — was still alive. Essentially, he was an SEC school claiming every national championship before the 1940s.

They bought it, consolidated under the counterfeit letters, and the rest — as they say — is history. And by history, I mean “famous alumni” William James Bryan called out the total inaccuracy of the World Almanac’s publication of his vital role in the development of this sham frat, Patterson was exposed as a fraud, booted from said sham frat, and Sigma Pi came crumbling to its knees. But like a cockroach, they continued to crawl on well past nuclear annihilation.

Famous Sigma Pis that suck:

The guy that will void your iPhone warranty with a subpar cracked screen solution and what’s left of the brittle bag of bones that is second string quarterback Tony Romo.

Reasons you might not suck:

Thanks for Lyft, GoPro, Golf Channel, and childhood memories with Fisher-Price toys.

Definitive reason you suck:

You’re the Lance Armstrong of fraternities without the personal success, talent, or positive impact on society.

Want to be part of the next fraternity rush preview? Just email me at [email protected] and give me ample evidence of why your fraternity sucks: personal anecdotes, encounters with other chapters, etc. I’ll throw any good material into the post and give you proper credit. Next up: Delta Upsilon