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Knudson: Mascot Madness

By Mark Knudson, The Mtn. Insider
March 14, 2012

If you’re like me, you’re sick and tired of getting embarrassed by the little old lady in accounting who keeps whipping your behind in the company office pool every March. You think you know a little something about college basketball. Maybe you know more than a little something. Maybe you follow the sport religiously. Maybe you can recite the starting lineups of all 68 teams in the tourney.  Maybe you’re as well qualified to handicap this tournament as any of the talking heads on the tube. Maybe people should be coming to you for advice on how to fill out their brackets.

Then again, maybe you know too much.

Where has all this college hoops acumen gotten you in the past few years? It’s gotten you a crumpled up and tossed in the trash after the first weekend kind of bracket, hasn’t it? Admit it. You’ve angrily thrown in the towel before the Sweet Sixteen ever tips off. You knew who should win, but didn’t pick the team that actually did win, right?

Yep. You know too much. The more you know about college hoops, the worse you do in every single March Madness pool you enter.
 
So now that it’s time for this year’s sheets to get turned in, and here’s a suggestion: Stop the insanity (i.e. doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result). Come on over to the Dark Side. The “what the heck, it’s just for fun side.” The “I’m going to try something really different this year” side. Join me for some irreverence.

This year, I’m going with the toughest mascots.

That’s right. This year, I’m picking the winners of these games based on which team has the tougher mascot. I have to admit, this isn’t a perfect system. Sometimes it’s not obvious, but rather subjective when you have to decide which mascot is tougher. For instance, while it’s easy to pick a Seminole over a Bonnie, it’s not so easy to determine if a Wolfpack is tougher than a Hoya or if a Gator is tougher than a Tiger. Both are pretty darn tough. On the other end, how do you evaluate an Orange or a Crimson? What’s to choose from between a Blue Jay and a Crimson Tide? Do I go with the Elephant? Do birds – including Jayhawks – stand any sort of chance?

I guess when it comes down to birds you just have to wing it.

There must be some creativity involved. For instance, you might have to go bigger picture when you see a Cyclone, which is a tornado to most of us, against a Wildcat. What chance does any animal have against the wrath of Mother Nature? What of a Mountaineer? You need to be a tough guy to climb mountains, but can you fight a Bulldog? And what happens when the Tigers meet…the Tigers?

So many questions, so little time to get this thing turned in.

When it comes to the Mountain West teams, you have to like the chances of a Lobo (wolf) against a Wildcat, don’t you? And a Rebel (with a gun) can certainly take out a Buffalo, right? What chance does an Aztec – in the singular – have against a pack of Wolves? And while we love the term Ram Tough, what happens when Cam the Ram is up against the Racers?

As I said, there’s still a lot of room for interpretation and a lot of tough decisions to make. A National Champion Mascot? After a Cyclone wipes out the Wildcats and some pack of Tigers takes out the Spartans (without swords) and the Wolverines eat the Tar Heels and the Seminoles (with spears) eliminate the Grizzlies, who barely survived another set of Wildcats, what are we left with? Perhaps the dark, supernatural and evil magic of the Blue Devils conquering all?

I don’t think the little old lady in accounting has much to worry about after all.
See all of Mark Knudson's blog entries HERE.