Poster Illustrates the Breaththaking Unoriginality of College Mascot Names
Considering they're the places where wide-eyed and financially over-extended youths go to kindle their creative flames, colleges can be awfully uninspiring when it comes to the names of their sports teams. The skilled counters at Pop Chart Lab have done us the service of highlighting this shortcoming with their Chart of Collegiate Sports Teams poster, a pretty-lines-and-circles look at just how little time and effort the 43 schools who call themselves the "Tigers" must have put into the christening of their mascot. (Kudos to Tuskegee, Lincoln, Morehouse and Brenau for at least tacking a color onto their Tigers.)
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While many of the unusual team names are amusing on their own merits—the Lord Jeffs, the Green Terror, the two instances of Battling Bishops—the Pop Chart crew also seemingly poked fun at the entire mascot-name landscape with category nodes such as "Double-Sainted", "Resource Extraction" and "Based on Cheers." (I imagine that when you're organizing and plotting more than 1,100 school mascots, you have fun wherever you can.) The poster can be purchased on Pop Chart's site for $30.00, which works out to less than 3 cents per mascot listed.
