I overheard the Boarder talking to himself the other morning about an idea he had for a column, and I’ve decided to beat him to the punch, to “preempt him,” as law review editors like to say, or so I’m told. The Boarder was talking about doing a piece on college mascots and nicknames. The more I heard him talking to himself, the more I got interested in the topic. So, I did a little research, and I feel like I have some interesting thoughts to share.
I’ll start off by saying that I’m not going to waste time on Wahoos and Hokies. I mean who even knows what either one is or even what the words mean? I understand what is now referred to as a Hokie was once known as a Gobbler and a Wahoo once was a Cavalier. At least those are words that mean something. Don’t get me started on the St. Louis Billikens!
I have given thought to some of the more absurd team mascots – like the Stanford Tree. That’s one that will strike fear into the hearts of your opponents. “Their team was moving down the field like a tree!” And the Cal Irvine Anteaters and the Cal Santa Cruz Banana Slugs? What do all these schools have in common? California. Enough said. I have to throw the Ohio State Buckeye into the mix too though. Who names their school after an acorn? Or was it a piece of candy? Maybe OSU should move to Cali.
Now being a cat, I have a partiality for animal mascots, or at least certain ones, like the California Golden Bears and the UCLA Bruins and the Baylor Bears and the Maine Black Bears. Ferocious imagery, something to fear. You know the old expression – “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, except for bears, bears will kill you.” Compare to the Syracuse Orange (a fruit? with pulp?) and the Dartmouth Green (the green what? what is the mascot? a pickle?) and the Minnesota Golden Gophers and Wisconsin Badgers (sound like cartoon characters).
I am not enamored with schools that have picked nicknames like yellow jackets (like Georgia Tech and Randolph Macon) or the Spiders of Richmond (the Boarder says he called them the Fighting Arachnids when he was in college) or the Wasps of Emory & Henry or the Boll Weevils of Arkansas Monticello (I kid you not). Little, irritating creatures you can squash with your paw. They might hurt you a little, but they are hardly to be feared. Not mascot material, in my opinion. I swat the things out of the air.
I have to admit confusion over the schools that apparently used Al Roker to pick their nicknames – like the Iowa State Cyclones and the Miami Hurricane, although their names make some sense, but the St. Johns Red Storm (what exactly is that?) and the Tulsa Golden Hurricane (you get a lot of hurricanes in Oklahoma?). Come on now.
Another group of mascots I don’t get are the devil worshipers – like the Duke Blue Devils and the Wake Forest Demon Deacons and the Arizona State Sun Devils. They are a little scary, but the optics are bad. Hard to align with the devil. Sadly, my Boarder has clothing that says Blue Demons, so he must have fallen under some spell himself. I think it has something to do with where he went to high school.
Living in West Virginia, we have some interesting high school team nicknames ourselves – for instance, we have a town called Poca. The high school nickname? The Dots of course! The Poca Dots – get it? Some clever thinking there. A former high school near where I live with the Boarder had a nickname that was hard to figure out. The school is now gone, Harrisville High, but its sports teams in the day were known as the Gators. Given that the school was in the hills of West Virginia, near Ohio, I couldn’t make the connection. But through some research and talking with the Boarder, I figured out that the name had something to do with a four-wheel drive vehicle the kids in that area liked to drive through the hills. You got me. And we have the Fairmont Senior Polar Bears. I sure have seen a lot of them around!
There are a couple of groups of mascots that I simply detest and can’t understand why any self-respecting group would choose to identify with. First are the birds – like the Boston College Eagles and the Southern Miss Golden Eagles and the Auburn War Eagles and the Miami of Ohio Red Hawks and the South Carolina Gamecocks (a chicken?) and the Rice Owls (creepy!) and the Oregon Ducks (another cartoon character?). A more worthless species to pick a mascot from I cannot imagine. These creatures serve no earthly purpose other than to irritate my kind.
And now the worst. The dogs! Particularly the bulldogs! They are ubiquitous – Georgia (too much attention these days), Gonzaga (ditto), Mississippi State, Yale, the Citadel. Bad enough to pick a dog as your mascot, but why the ugliest one around? Although I have to admit that the sad sack hound that the University of Tennessee uses comes close on the “All Ugly Mascot Team.” Then there are the Huskies at Washington (I always pull for the Cougars of Washington State, for obvious reasons) and UConn and the Wolfpack at N.C. State and Nevada Reno. While I understand some types of this species once served useful purposes, that day is long gone. When I think of the modern-day dog, I think of a creature who couldn’t forage for food if her life depended on it and who has to ask for help to go to the bathroom. They make pathetic mascots.
I do have teams that I’m partial to – like the Arizona Wildcats and the Kentucky Wildcats and the LSU Bayou Bengals (delicious nickname – I love Cajun food) and the Auburn Tigers (the school’s schizophrenic – War Eagles and Tigers and Plainsmen – pick one darn it!) and the Cincinnati Bearcats (don’t know what one is, but love the imagery) and the Ohio U. Bobcats and the BYU Cougars. I think I should also like the Pitt Panthers but something about where I live makes that impossible.
There are some really weird ones out there too – like the TCU Horned Frogs (what must that thing look like?) and the Texas Longhorns (dumbest creature on the planet) and the UNC Tar Heels (where’d that come from?).
The funniest story I came across is at Purdue, that great engineering school in Indiana. The name that won out, Boilermakers, had stiff competition from such early candidates as the Pumpkin-Shuckers, the Cornfield Sailors, the Grangers, and the Rail-Splitters. Boilermakers doesn’t seem so bad now, does it?
From what I can tell from hanging out with the Boarder, I don’t think he picks his teams based on the same factors I do. I hope my prejudices haven’t shown through too much.
