Go Tigers
Did you ever think about how stupid it is that there are 4 major college football powerhouses that are named The Tigers? That 3 of them (Mizzou, LSU, and Auburn) are in the same fucking conference? Did you know that there are over 60 more colleges that have Tigers as the mascot/team name? Did you know that I, David Rappoccio, am technically a Tiger myself (Rochester Institute of Technology). My mother is also a Tiger (Towson).
Did you know that Tiger isn’t even the most commonly used team name in collegiate sports? That would be Eagles. I find this all very disappointing. I wish we had more variety in our college names. Team names are a chance to make an identity and everyone keeps picking the same 10 tough animals. RIT, back in the 50’s, wasn’t The Tigers. They were “The Techmen”. Is “The Techmen” very stupid? You bet. Do I love it way more than Tigers? You bet I do. Techmen is unique. It has an identity. You can work with that. A beefed up nerd as a mascot would have been great. Instead RIT switched over to a generic angry animal and named the mascot SPIRIT because apparently asking nerds to have any sort of imagination is a terrible idea.
A lot of the best college team names are the unique ones. The Crimson Tide. The Aggies. The Cornhuskers. Boilermakers. Razorbacks. Thundering Herd. Blue Devils. Wolfpack. Yellow Jackets. There are a lot of cool ideas out there that teams could pick instead. You never really hear anyone call LSU the Tigers in casual conversation (they just say LSU, or Mizzou, or Clemson, or etc), but you will hear people say The Aggies. The Huskers.
Part of me wonders if colleges went with these names because it was easy to poach logos and styles off one another. Tigers is easy branding. Most of the colleges included in the comic are very small colleges that you likely haven’t even heard of. Many are community colleges, which means they have a low budget and probably do not have the interest to get creative for schools that are usually designed to be short quick stepping stones. I don’t know anyone with community college school spirit. Do not quote Community at me in the comments, I know someone is going to. Also to be fair to some of these mentioned colleges, they do try and go a little more unique and have some adjectives added to the name. Ex: the Andrew Fighting Tigers, the Brenau Golden Tigers, the Lincoln Blue Tigers. It makes them better, but it’s still Tigers.
I’ll give the Bengals credit. They went with the name being a specific type of tiger. They get all the advantages of Tiger branding but none of the drawbacks. Paul Brown: genius. The NFL has some good unique and special names in it (Steelers, 49ers, Browns, Packers). I think the NBA actually has the best selection of unique team names.
My high school was the Stang-Hawks (Mustangs with Hawk iwngs & a beak). Also, my community college changed from Hawks to Tigers in my 2nd year. I think they’re now the Cougars.
I would have thought Wildcats was the most common one
probably programmed to think that way by that old Simpsons joke “Hey team, who are we?” (team)”The Wildcats!” “and who are we gonna beat?” (team)”The WILDCATS!!!”
Hah, i was going to make the exact comment/reference as well.
…for the record i am also a Wildcat (UofA)
TIL which UofA is the Wildcats (Arizona), which are the Seawolves (Alaska), and which are the Golden Bears and Pandas (Alberta).
I was going to guess Wildcats too. Turns out that’s only TENTH most common
(and for the record, I’m a Wildcat (Kansas State) and my kids are Wildcats (Arizona))
Actually Auburn is also known as the War Eagles lol. Sounds better than a generic tiger. And that RIT comment gave me flashbacks to the barge canal lol.
RIT is so close to a Yellowjacket school that RIT took over a UR dorm building for a while.
“Aggies” isn’t unique. Aside from Texas A&M, there’s Delaware Valley, New Mexico State, North Carolina A&T, Oklahoma Panhandle State, UC Davis, and Utah State.
I did not realize Aggies was so widespread, but still barely holds a candle to Tigers at least
Yeah, most of the schools with “Aggies” as their team name started as agricultural schools.
Ooooo! A Paul Quinn reference!
Aggies? Do you mean New Mexico State, Utah State, the one in College Station, (hops in time machine) Oklahoma A&M?
It seems to me that mascot sameness is an especially pronounced thing among new (generally) suburban high schools. Tigers, Wildcats, Cougars, Mustangs, Spartans, Warriors… blah blah blah. Not every school needs some quirky mascot begging to make some “weird high school nicknames” listicle, but a bit of variety and a look at local and school namesake history isn’t a bad place to start when looking for a mascot. There’s a nice middle ground to be found between the New Braunfels Unicorns and the Travis Tigers.
Once met a guy who went to DePauw for undergrad and DePaul for his masters. It was very confusing
I was lucky enough to have fairly unique nicknames/mascots for both HS and college. HS was the relatively-uncommon “Bombers” (generally depicted as a B-29 Superfortress from WWII because our town used to make a few of the parts for them).
College was the “Leathernecks” because our longtime AD/Football Coach/Baseball Coach/Basketball Coach from the mid-20s through mid-60s was a WWI marine war hero (awarded the Navy Cross) and he obtained permission from the Marine Corps to use the name. It’s the only non-military public school that is allowed to use a military nickname.
Ahhhh good ol’ Richland High. The way they also embraced the mushroom cloud into the school crest and logo was a bit poor taste for me.
Gonna need to toss in an honorable mention to Hokies. Truly unique among college mascots. Gobble gobble!
UCSC. Go banana slugs! we may not have been good at sports, but the mascot is rad
Banana Slugs rule, this is what embracing a unique name is all about
Personal favorite of mine as well.
Fashion Institute of Technology is not a real- Sweet Christmas, it’s real! What were they smoking when they came up with that name?
Dave, you need to get into college ultimate frisbee. Most schools aren’t able to use their schools trademarked logos so you get great names that are completely out there. Some of my favorites include: Swarthmore Warmothers, Oberlin Flying Horse-Cows, UNC Darkside, Air Force’s B-Team used to be called Virgin Airlines, and of course my alma mater, the Shippensburg Scapegoats
ECU’s football team is the Pirates; the ECU ultimate team was the Irates in the late 90s.
Is the main joke here that nobody’s even considering that he’s talking about the Detroit MLB team? It is the first week of August, baseball is in season and college football really isn’t.
Might have been Hull City? Preseason tours are going on here now after all.
Whatever you do, just don’t name your sports team a singular noun (Jazz/Heat/Stanford Cardinal). That drives me crazy. What are we supposed to call your players? “John Smith is a Miami Heat?”
Well stepfather finished his PhD at UR and I graduated high school there at the old Rush-Henrietta Roth Royals.
My high school had the uncommon name of Pekin “Dragons”, and it was changed from a a name that could land me in hot water if I mentioned it today.
Well, technically the US has the largest tiger population in the world, for all the wrong reasons.
Also, Aggies aren’t a unique mascot, Cal Davis is also the Aggies along with a few other schools. It just means agricultural/farmers
There are a few teams I’ll always root for solely on the basis of the mascot being different, like Wofford (Terriers) and Richmond (Spiders).
“there are 4 major college football powerhouses that are named The Tigers? That 3 of them (Mizzou, LSU, and Auburn) are in the same fucking conference?“
Yeah let’s pump the brakes there. Mizzou, a football powerhouse? When?
Powerhouse in the sense that they are a division 1 school that competes in the most well known division and most people know who they are
compare Mizzou to most of the schools on the list and it makes more sense
I regularly drive past Olivet Nazarene’s office-style buildings in Rolling Meadows and Oak Park, but have never seen the main campus, so I was surprised to learn they had any athletics department at all.
My favorite weird-and-obsolete team name is UCF. Before being rebranded the (Golden) Knights, they were the fucking CITRANAUTS; a fucking fantastic fusion of Florida’s favorite fruit and, you know, space.
Not a day goes by I don’t yearn for them to get their head on straight and go back to being Citranauts.
Sounds like it should be a low-gravity IPA.
I think the Arkansas School for the Deaf Leopards should be the only ones allowed to have that mascot.
Can’t even mention the Golden Gophers in your unique team names smh
Born and raised Minnesotan (though UofMN is not my alma mater), and I respect how unique and goofy that name is. But I have to say the Wisconsin folks also got a good name with the Badgers.
Texans is pretty good
I went to high school and we were the Eagles. Ho hum. Then I went to Iowa State, which has a pretty unique name of Cyclones. They used to be the Cardinals, but then some sportswriter compared the team to “an Iowa cyclone” after a win. The university decided that was a much better team name and went with it.
The university where I spent a year on exchange, Idaho State, has been nicknamed the Bengals since 1935. The school newspaper has had a Bengal tiger on the masthead since 1931. Benny the Bengal is one of the best mascots in college, full stop.
So Go Bengals!!!
Taking a name like that which dozens of other teams have is dumb, but so are all the teams named for occupations. Those names were chosen to honor local workers, a great thing, but I think an awesome way of doing that is just the general outreach NFL players and teams get up to around the year. It’s just boring to name the team after a local job when you have all the creativity in the world to draw from. I also am not a huge fan of tying up too much of a team’s identity in their city, as inevitable as that might be. I see a ton of fans that don’t seem to realize not everyone who roots for an NFL team lives in one of 30 North American cities.
For uniqueness, it’s hard to top the Washburn (Kansas) Fighting Ichabods.
Oddly enough, not named for the headless horseman Ichabod Crane, but for the college’s founder, Ichabod Washburn
Now I can’t stop saying Ichabod. Ichabod Ichabod Ichabod….
There’s an Ichabod Crane High School in Upstate NY. Their teams are the Riders.
This comic reminded me of an minor argument I had with my friend’s mom over Auburn’s mascot. She was 100% convinced that they were called the ‘War Eagles’ and not the Tigers because she mistook their tradition of shouting “War Eagle!” while an actual Eagle flies to midfield before games as being representative of their mascot.
Looking back, I can’t blame her at all. It’s not the weirdest tradition I’ve seen in CFB, but, like, pick a lane dude. Why call yourself the Tigers if your most famous tradition (that is admittedly a lot cooler) involves a completely different animal?
Try these.
https://hugequiz.com/quizzes/ncaa-division-nicknames/
https://hugequiz.com/quizzes/ncaa-division-i-ii-iii-unique-nicknames/
Figured I could throw a little business Darin’s way.
SEWANEE MENTIONED
(My alma mater. We don’t get much sports love despite having the single greatest season in the history of college football, mainly because we’ve been breathtakingly terrible since.)
I too am a Tiger. (High School) Tahlequah Tigers (Oklahoma). Just about every institution that selected that mascot has an urban legend that one time back in the 18 or 19whatevers a tiger escaped from the traveling circus and was seen roaming this area for many years. I think it’s hogwash (which would make a more interesting name b.t.w.). The probably truer story is that our institution’s founders were not very creative or imaginative and, in our case, leaned heavily on alliteration–like Stan Lee. Our fight song is “On Wisconsin” which someone changed the lyrics to say “Onward Tigers”, but if the students plagiarize a paper…
I went to Trinity (TX), a division 3 school with one moment of glory (2007 miracle play vs Millsaps with 2 seconds left and involving some 15 laterals that took over a minute to complete). This is well after I was there in which they were awful (they won their first game during my time there my junior year). As for “Tigers”, yeah, its pretty generic, uninspiring and all that.