Among the incongruous elements of the graphic was that soldiers protecting Luck’s character were wearing the gray uniforms of the Confederacy. Some observers found the use of “Dixie” odd, if not offensive, because Indiana fought on the Union side of the Civil War and lost more than 25,000 out of approximately 200,000 from the state who served in battle.

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“It was a mistake to use this song. We regret having done so and we apologize,” ESPN spokesman Josh Krulewitz said in a statement to Michael McCarthy of Sporting News.

According to historian Christian McWhirter, via a 2012 essay for the New York Times, “Dixie” was written in 1859 by a Northerner for a minstrel show, and although its lyrics after the first verse are not overtly pro-South — they involve an array of “minstrel cliches,” as McWhirter put it, the chorus proclaims, “I wish I was in Dixie, Hooray! Hooray!/In Dixie’s Land I’ll take my stand/to live and die in Dixie.”

“In contrast to the Union’s anthem, ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ invoking God’s wrath, ‘Dixie’ is sentimental and elegiac, recalling this land of cotton fields and buckwheat cakes and a kind of slow-moving world that can seem appealing through rose-colored glasses,” Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Tony Horwitz, author of “Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War,” told NPR last year. "[It] speaks to a bygone, slow-paced world that some white Southerners felt had been snuffed out by a brutish, industrial North. And it was another way of steering memory away from slavery, toward a war between what Southerners call ‘a different way of life.’ ”

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Horvitz noted that “Dixie” was “part of the score of “Birth of a Nation,” the movie that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan” and was “embraced by the segregationist Dixiecrats in the 1940s.” Soon after gaining popularity in the North, the song caught on in the South and became the unofficial anthem of the Confederacy.

For decades, “Dixie” was played by the University of Mississippi’s marching band at football games and other events until the school ended that practice in 2016, citing a goal of “making sure we follow our creed, core values of the athletic department, and that all people feel welcome.” On Saturday and into Sunday as Twitter users responded to the ESPN’s posting of the graphic, some objected to its usage by the network.

According to McCarthy, a source at ESPN said that “Dixie” was not part of the graphic when it was conceived and approved. Instead, the song was “dropped into the piece at the last moment by a staffer in the production truck,” per McCarthy’s source, who claimed that the network spoke with the staffer but would not disclose what came of that discussion.