You probably missed it. Either because you were too distracted by the ongoing goings-on of conference media days, or perhaps because you miss a lot of stuff because your peripheral vision is perpetually hindered by tiny papier-mâché eye slots or swatches of flappy faux fur. But last week, the college mascots of America gathered in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to dance. And dance. And dance. No matter how big or felt-covered their feet might be.
As we watched the collegiate creatures cut a rug (not to mention their minor league baseball counterparts win the post-Coldplay interwebs), it got us thinking. No, not NIL/revenue sharing/eyes-glazed-over thinking. Fun thinking. Well, fun until we make one of them mad and they come for us in the night with those googly eyes.
Who is the greatest college football mascot in all the land?
It’s a complicated question. So, taking a page from the expanded CFP playbook and trying to make it fair, we made it even more convoluted. In a mascot multiverse made up of so many mixed-up monsters, mammals and miscellany, we decided to break up the discussion into five categories.
If you’d like to turn this into a bracket and sort out the champ, go for it. We’re going to stick with the divisions. Because we don’t want to wake up one morning to find that Cal Poly’s Musty the Mustang has left one of his horse heads in our bed.
Costume Division
5. Keggy the Keg, Dartmouth
For decades, Dartmouth, which dropped the symbol and nickname “Indians” from its sports teams in the early 1970s, had no mascot to go with its new moniker “The Big Green.” But in 2003, an on-campus humor magazine debuted an anthropomorphic beer keg and named it Keggy the Keg. And yes, that is the most Ivy League sentence I have ever written.
To no one’s surprise, the still-new internet made Keggy famous. Also to no one’s surprise, Dartmouth administrators didn’t like that. Despite the foamy resistance and its ongoing status as an unofficial mascot, there aren’t many events where Keggy isn’t serving up cold and refreshing support for the Big Green.
4. The Stanford Tree
Different coast, similar story. Stanford also ditched the “Indians” name and mascot in the early ’70s, and while the name “Cardinal” was adopted, the always quirky Stanford band pitched a series of mascots…
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