College Football Mascots
October 3, 2000
The history of mascots is a rather interesting topic and, if ESPN had given me the 20-minute segment they promised, I probably could have told you all about it last weekend.
The first question that came to mind when I thought about this was what do all those mascots do during the off-season? I thought I saw Revile, the Texas A&M doggie, running some races at a track near Austin last year, at least the burnt orange tarp he was wearing sure looked familiar. And I know that the USC mascot Traveler had a long successful career as TV's "Mr. Ed".
Meanwhile, the Notre Dame leprechaun has a long off-season history of being rented out for entertainment at children's parties. But the leprechaun doesn’t just entertain children. Sometimes he’s invited to other, more special parties for middle-aged ex-Notre Dame coeds. I understand that they'll be releasing some of those on video soon under the title "Dwarfs Do Dunbar".
Nobody knows the real origin of mascots. Presumably it all ties in with nicknames and so forth. It's also an interesting tale of biology and specialized breeding techniques.
One of the more famous mascots is UGA, the University of Georgia bulldog. Georgia botanists have spent years trying to breed the perfect UGA, because they need just the right proportions to fit the official UGA sweater. If the breeding isn't done very carefully, the dog ends up being too big or too small and the sweater looks bad on him, so it's really a very delicate process. Dogs that don’t make the cut still stay in Athens. They are sold to a well-known Korean restaurant in town, Cream d’Woof, which features "UGA Soup".
Other schools have had similar success with breeding mascots. You may have noticed how the heads of the Purdue Boilermaker mascot and the Michigan State "Spikey" mascot have shrunk over the years. This is due to many generations of careful breeding.
The experimental work has often resulted in mascots well-suited for sideline work. That's how aquatic scientists at the University of Miami were able to breed a duck that can stand on its hind legs. I understand that achievement, by scientist Dr. Wilson I. Biss, nearly won the Nobel Prize for Biology in 1964.
Not all mascot experiments have been successful. Perhaps the most famous failure occurred at the University of Michigan about 30 years ago. New Wolverine coach Bo Schembechler wanted a Wolverine mascot to roam the sidelines in Ann Arbor.
Michigan scientists, unable to locate an actual wolverine, figured they'd have to breed one. So they did a lot of studies on mascots and figured out which ones had the right qualities to produce a wolverine through breeding.
They finally determined which two well-bred mascots would produce the new Michigan wolverine mascot. They rented the most recently retired version of UGA (a female) from Georgia, because they knew that a wolverine had the vicious, tenacious nature of a bulldog. Then they determined they needed some rodent genes in order to provide the general appearance of a Wolverine, so they contacted their Big 10 comrades in Madison and got the use of the Wisconsin Badger mascot.
Then they got the badger and the bulldog together for the mating. This badger was a rather tall one, almost 6 feet, that could stand on his hind legs and actually wore a sweater with the letter "W" on it! He walked into the room where the bulldog was in heat and ready to go.
Once he saw the bulldog there, the badger opened his mouth and began to talk! Believe it or not, the badger had been bred so he could talk too! "You said you were going to hook me up with this ‘hot bitch from Georgia’, not some canine! What sort of twisted perverts are you U-M guys anyway?" and left the room.
The Michigan people were caught off-guard and thought they might have to go to their backup mating mascot, the Syracuse orange testicle, who was chosen for his obvious potency. But one of their people ran out of the room and hogtied the badger, knocked him out, and somehow managed to complete the breeding process.
Two months later the bulldog gave birth to a litter of four potential U-M mascots. Upon seeing the first photos, the University of Georgia claimed custody, stating that new mascots, which were tall and could talk like the badger, but had a bulldog face, looked exactly like Georgia coach Vince Dooley.
A number of DNA tests were performed and it was learned that the mascots actually were related to Dooley, whose genes had been grafted into UGA a couple generations earlier. So Georgia won the custody battle. The bulldog/badger mascots eventually enrolled there and became honors students in Athens and three of them have been elected to the Georgia Legislature.
After the embarrassment of the custody episode, Michigan officials vowed never to have an official University of Michigan mascot, which is why Michigan is one of the few schools without a mascot, unless you count Lee Corso.