This week we are going to look at the very opposite sides of mascotdom, all from one school. We like to point out either how fierce a mascot can look versus how cartoony a mascot can look. Both have its plusses and both have its minuses. But what if you’re a school that wants to cover all of the bases when it comes to mascots? Well, you do what Xavier did and have a mascot to fill each role. Let’s take a trip down to Cincinnati, Ohio and check out Xavier’s D’Artagnan and the Blue Blob.
We’re gearing up for a road trip this week. If you are down in the Austin, Texas area for SXSW for the next 2 weeks, be sure to drop us a line. The contrast between the home of the Texas Longhorns and the leader Big 12 South versus Kansas City and the epicenter of the Big 12 North should give us plenty of fodder to chew on for the next couple of weeks. We’re taking no breaks, however, and this week’s Mascot Monday also gives us a good contrast between a good mascot and a bad one. Now, we’ve seen some non-plussed mascots before but we think YoUDee from the University of Delaware takes the cake. So come with us on the journey to find out about this blue hen.
We can take a couple of more days to draw up a preview of each conference and then roll the dice on how the bowls will shore up but that would take way too much time and reach far out of our happy little niche. So what we are going to do instead is spit up some predictions for what’s going to happen this year in college football. We may talk about your favorite conference, we may not. Chances are we’ll predict the title winner, but we may over look the Outland Trophy Award winner. Who knows? We’re loading up our straws (or empty pens) and seeing what sticks to the wall for 2009.
We’re winding down to the end of the off season and the end of our first foray into Mascot Mondays. We have a couple of more to go before we pack the suit away in the trunk and turn off the lights. But before we go away, we have a couple of more guys, er gals, er blobs to feature. So this week we will take a look at one of the influences to this here series. We’ve always known mascots to be fun and lovable while at the same time be fearsome and intimidating to opponents. But every time we see Western Kentucky’s Big Red, we wonder just what the heck does this thing do? We’ll try to figure that out on top of answering why he’s so dang popular.