GIFT OF GAB': Mascots Come in All Shapes and Sizes

Who is our mascot?

Harvard’s team name is the Crimson-like the Stanford Cardinal and the Syracuse Orange, an uninspiring color.

And I think I may remember someone dressing up as John Harvard once freshman year. But I’m pretty sure he was killed by that giant, freakish hawk that terrorizes the Yard, the one last seen destroying a small beast on Friday afternoon.

If you stop and consider the many, many horrible other names out there, maybe the Crimson actually isn’t so bad. I mean, we could be the UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs.

Anyway, let me pause for a minute to trace this train of thought back to where it began, a couple of weeks ago at a fencing meet.

As the Harvard Crimson was destroying the Brandeis Judges in one of the only sports I know for sure our fellow Boston-area college has, I began to think about the lack of luster in writing about the Crimson competing against the Judges. There might not be anything nearly as unexciting as a matchup between those two oddly named teams.

Perusing Yahoo Sports and asking my friends and fellow sports writers led to a bounty of bizarre collegiate nomenclature, from the College of Notre Dame (Calif.) Argonauts to the Sweet Briar College (Va.) Vixens-and everything in between.

Some obscure names come up once in a generation, as the TCU Horned Frogs did when they recently broke into the national college football rankings for a short spell.

And some will forever be associated with the “what is in the drinking water at that no-name school?” category. I think I can fairly say that the Evergreen College Geoducks—with apologies to any reader who is a Geoducks fanatic—belong in the latter.

The most prevailing issue concerning the topic of mascots and team names is obviously the question of how much fear they strike into the heart of the opposition.

Without even knowing anything about the teams, I would definitely feel more comfortable with my favorite Harvard squad taking on the UC Irvine Anteaters or the Coastal Carolina Chanticleers (I have looked up the definition on this one and am still not sure I know what that word means) than some other squad named the Hawks, Bulldogs, Runnin’ Rebels or the like.

The other compelling aspect of mascot craziness and odd name-changing comes in the urban legends that develop. For instance, I have no idea why Akron is named after some weird form of Kangaroo—they are apparently called the Zips—but there has to be some amazing story behind that mascot. Legends like that become campus folklore.

Furman University has built maybe an even more incredible myth, forged when it changed from a college to a university.

Although the school’s website does not list any other team name except the Paladins, there are rumors to the effect that the team used to be called the Christian Knights.

Think about it for a second. When Furman College changed to Furman University, the noble, virtuous Christian Knights would have been abbreviated as FUC...exactly.

These interesting musings surely make many a bored Harvard fan wonder about what it would be like if only we weren’t simply a color.

Then again, the Crimson does not try to overcompensate by adding “Big” before its name to make a color seem scary. That would just be silly.

Wouldn’t it, Dartmouth and Cornell?

—Staff writer Gabriel M. Velez can be reached at gmvelez@fas.harvard.edu.