By: O. Konheim
The weirdest college mascots
I'm from the Washington D.C. area and I'm well-aware of the fact that there are mascots from all walks of life with funny and absurd names. The writer of this article for cracked.com, for example, (http://www.cracked.com/article _15646_worlds-most-ridiculous- sports-team-names.html, demonstrates that if you look hard enough, you could find some pretty rediculous names of mascots all around the world.
I have come into contact with a few universities in this area, including my alma matta, that have some pretty rediculous mascots. I would have to say that my own alma matta, James Madison University, had a pretty silly team name. Our mascot was the Duke Dogs or the JMU Dukes for short. Technicially, there is no such thing as a duke dog. The origin of the name comes from the fact that the University's second president from 1919 to 1949, who had the surname "Duke", used to walk his dog all over campus (wikipedia does not confirm or deny this). The mascot is very friendly and very cute in its royal garments, but it is difficult to explain the Duke Dog's appeal to outsiders. When I tried to explain to my friend that "our mascot with a crown on his head who thinks he's royalty," he responded "Ohhh, so he's a delusional dog?"
I might have been insulted if my friend didn't go to neighboring Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA, which is one of the few schools that had an even worse mascot. As a general rule, Virginia Tech students should not be permitted to make fun of anyone else's mascot. The Hokes would actually be a shoe-in in the above-list's non-threatening animal category (The Cracked.com article has UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs and Columbia College Fighting Koalas on the list). My two questions for those at Virginia Tech, since I have not visited your college much and am not familiar with your relationship to your macot, is a) do you have a thanksgiving tradition where you try to chase him around your field with silverware on thanksgiving and try to eat him on Thanksgiving and b) why not? It sounds like fun.
And can we take a minute to reflect on local school University of Maryland? No matter how great their basketball, soccer, and lacrosse teams are, it's hard to feel threatened by a turtle, which is what a terapin is. Is their cross-country team's primary strategy to lull their opponent into a sense of false confidence and hope that they take frequent breaks over the race course?
