Florida Atlantic University
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40 free Florida Atlantic University trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Florida Atlantic University opened in 1964 on the grounds of a former military base in Boca Raton, and it has been collecting stories worth retelling ever since. Few campuses can claim a protected colony of owls, football stands within sight of the sea and a basketball team that came within a single shot of playing for a national title. This quiz gathers the best FAU fun facts in one place: the secret wartime work done where students now study, the coaches and players who put the Owls on the map, game-day traditions, research that reaches from the seabed to space, and the comedians, musicians, inventors and athletes who studied here. It is written for students, alumni and fans, for anyone planning an FAU trivia night or tailgate, and for curious players who enjoy a college story well told. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave knowing more about the Owls than when you arrived.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01FAU's Boca Raton campus sits on a World War II Army airfield that trained troops in which secret technology?
Radar
Radar was so new and secret that Boca Raton held the Army Air Forces' only wartime school for it, and trainees had to pass a background investigation to attend.
Q 02Which sitting US president came to Boca Raton to dedicate FAU and received the first degree it ever awarded?
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon B. Johnson accepted an honorary doctorate at the dedication, telling a crowd of 15,000 that education should be open to everyone who could qualify.
Q 03Which prop comedian with a Las Vegas residency enrolled at FAU and first tried stand-up during his first year there?
Carrot Top
Carrot Top, born Scott Thompson, grew up in Cocoa, Florida, where a swimming coach gave him the nickname that later became his stage name.
Q 04Which local sea animals does FAU's Elasmo Lab study using drones, aerial surveys and underwater video?
Sharks
Sharks and rays are the lab's speciality, above all the blacktips that crowd local waters each season, which it follows to learn what drives their migration.
Q 05The World War II runways still visible on FAU's Boca Raton campus are mainly used for what today?
Parking
Parking now covers the four runways of the old Army airfield, and a neighbouring college's lot is the concrete ramp where B-17 bombers once stood.
Q 06A 2013 deal to name FAU's football stadium collapsed after protests over what kind of company?
A private prison firm
A private prison firm, GEO Group, had offered about $6 million for the name, and an FAU play-by-play announcer promptly dubbed the venue Owlcatraz.
Q 07Part of the wartime airfield that became FAU's campus was taken from the last farmers of a colony from which country?
Japan
Japan was home to the Yamato Colony's pineapple growers; its last families lost their land to the airfield in 1942, and Yamato Road in Boca Raton keeps the name.
Q 08FAU's 2023 Final Four run ended by one point on a buzzer-beater scored by which team?
San Diego State
San Diego State won 72–71 when Lamont Butler's jump shot dropped at the horn, ending a 35-win FAU season, the most by any Division I men's team that year.
Q 09Former FAU point guard Brittany Bowe went on to win Olympic medals for the United States in which sport?
Speed skating
Speed skating brought Brittany Bowe two Olympic bronzes, and in 2022 she gave her 500-metre place to teammate Erin Jackson, who went on to win the gold.
Q 10What is the nickname of FAU's basketball arena, officially named for donor Eleanor R. Baldwin?
The Burrow
The Burrow suits a school whose owl mascot nests in the ground; the arena opened in 1984 for women's basketball, four years before FAU had a men's team.
Q 11FAU's annual football rivalry game against FIU is named for which Hall of Fame NFL head coach?
Don Shula
Don Shula had worked with both schools' first head coaches, one as his assistant and one as his player, so the game and its travelling trophy took his name.
Q 12FAU's football field is named for founding coach Howard Schnellenberger, who won a 1983 national title at which school?
Miami
Miami had never won a national title before he arrived; at FAU he began with no team at all, raising $13 million in pledges before a game was played.
Q 13Which former USC and Tennessee head coach won two Conference USA titles at FAU before leaving for Ole Miss?
Lane Kiffin
Q 21Chris Carrabba, who studied education at FAU, is the singer and songwriter behind which emo band?
Dashboard Confessional
Dashboard Confessional made him a face of early-2000s emo; he had moved to Boca Raton at 16 and played in local bands while he was at FAU.
Q 22Joan Joyce, FAU's softball coach for 28 years, struck out which Hall of Fame slugger in a 1961 exhibition?
Ted Williams
Ted Williams faced pitches that topped 70 miles per hour; Joyce went on to earn her 1,000th win as a head coach just days before her death in 2022.
Q 23In the 2023 NCAA tournament, FAU's second-round win came against which 16-seed that had just stunned top-seeded Purdue?
Fairleigh Dickinson
Lane Kiffin arrived from running Alabama's offense, and his first FAU team won its last ten games, finishing with a 50–3 postseason rout of Akron.
Q 14Which coach took FAU men's basketball to the 2023 Final Four and left a year later for Michigan?
Dusty May
Dusty May never had a losing season in six years at FAU, and his center Vladislav Goldin followed him north when he took the Michigan job.
Q 15Which conservation group declared FAU's Boca Raton campus an official owl sanctuary in 1971?
Audubon Society
The Audubon Society's designation was meant to shield the owls from campus construction; the birds favour the site because the wartime airfield stripped it of vegetation.
Q 16What is the name of FAU's organized student tailgating area on football game days?
The Rat's Mouth
The Rat's Mouth plays on the city's Spanish name, which early maps gave to an inlet on Biscayne Bay before mapmakers misplaced it to the north.
Q 17FAU students make 'Owl Fingers' during free throws and extra-point kicks using which familiar hand gesture?
The OK sign
The OK sign became Owl Fingers in 2002; its creators designed it to spell the word owl, with thumb and index finger as the O and the other three fingers as the W.
Q 18Which FAU club team, an unlikely fit for South Florida, won its first national championship in 2025?
Ice hockey
Ice hockey is a non-varsity club sport at FAU, yet the Owls won the AAU College Hockey national championship in 2025, practising at the Florida Panthers' rink in Coral Springs.
Q 19Submersibles from Harbor Branch, now part of FAU, found a faulty rocket booster on the seabed from which space shuttle?
Challenger
Challenger broke apart in 1986, and the recovered booster held the failed seal that caused it; the same submersibles also examined the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor.
Q 20FAU master's graduate Mark Dean holds three of the nine patents behind which company's 1981 personal computer?
IBM
IBM hired Mark Dean straight after his first degree, and in 1995 he became the first African American to be named an IBM Fellow.
Fairleigh Dickinson was only the second 16-seed ever to beat a 1-seed, and it had reached the field without even winning its conference tournament.
Q 24FAU clinched its first Final Four by beating Kansas State 79–76 in which famous arena?
Madison Square Garden
Madison Square Garden staged both of FAU's regional wins, over Tennessee and Kansas State; before that March the Owls had never won an NCAA tournament game.
Q 25Which Pennsylvania school beat FAU 40–7 in the Owls' first-ever football game in 2001?
Slippery Rock
Slippery Rock spoiled the debut before 25,632 fans in an NFL stadium, but FAU got its first win a game later, 31–28 over Bethune–Cookman.
Q 26In 1965 FAU launched the first undergraduate program in the United States devoted to which field?
Ocean engineering
Ocean engineering still has a seaside campus of its own, SeaTech in Dania Beach, set between the Atlantic and the Intracoastal Waterway.
Q 27Which group of students did FAU first admit in 1984, twenty years after the university opened?
Freshmen and sophomores
Freshmen and sophomores were left out by design: Florida wanted FAU to pick up where community colleges stopped, enrolling students who already held associate degrees.
Q 28FAU's Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College has its own residential campus in which Palm Beach County town?
Jupiter
Jupiter is home to the John D. MacArthur Campus, where honors students live for their first two years beside Scripps and Max Planck research labs.
Q 29Before FAU was built, the Army secretly grew which crop beside the airfield's runways for germ-warfare tests?
Wheat
Wheat was sprayed with a rust fungus so the spores could be harvested, part of a Cold War effort to find a way of wiping out the Soviet Union's crops.
Q 30Which former FAU pass rusher led the entire NFL in sacks in 2024 while playing for the Cincinnati Bengals?
Trey Hendrickson
Trey Hendrickson was only a third-round draft pick out of FAU, where he studied criminal justice, yet his 2024 season earned him the Deacon Jones Award.