The Joy of Dumb College Mascots

As an English major, I was taught early and often that I wouldn’t get anywhere without accepting other’s criticism. After all, placing words next to each other on a page is a vulnerable form of self-expression whether you’re dealing with a 10-page analysis of Jorge Borges or convincing people that your anagrams for love are superior to Cyrano de Bergerac's. You’re bound to get laughed at, a red mark slashed through a sentence because you ran on for too long. 

You couldn’t excel in gym, but suddenly you’re running just fine. In fact, you’re running too far. You can’t notice it because you have the runner’s high, punching out every word like blood through your veins. It feels good and it’s only when you stop and look at the red mark do you get that blow. Your muscles cramp, you punch your locker and yell to the ceiling about how you should’ve run with more of a strategy. Either that or the teacher just doesn’t understand you. What do they know?

English majors have no choice but to be humbled by the world around them. Every time they try to grow more complex, they have to realize that the best-sellers of the 2010s included erotic fan fiction of a Mormon author who made vampires glitter. What great criticism could you possibly give when people bought hundreds of millions of books that said: “I am fifty shades of fucked up”? There is something about existing in the middle, holding dearly onto academia as preservation for future generations as it is looking at the masses and wonder what drives them.

"Oh, f*ck the paperwork" indeed

I’m not saying that this goes without some head trauma. The quest to find meaning in the absurd is a unique journey that few think to venture on, and there’s nothing as wonderful as the ambiguity. What is life without uncertainty…

What is life without questioning The Stanford Tree?

He is a figure of notoriety, likely to top lists of the worst college mascots. Do you think Concordia College’s Cobber, the homicidal mascot made of a corncob, could compare to the magic of The Stanford Tree? It’s not even close. Even Dartmouth’s Keggy the Keg, in all of his negative implications, gives the school personality. Stanford University’s team is The Cardinals. What does a tree have to do with cardinals? Okay, maybe it’s a cardinal sin. Who knows? Still, there is something engrossing about imagining a football game. Stanford could score the winning touchdown, but we need to get the crowd riled up. The cheerleaders have been flipped too much and their heads are looser than their pompoms. Who could you possibly send out to create that morale boost that Stanford oh so dearly needs?

Cue the Laura Palmer theme for Twin Peaks. It becomes this surreal world where the crowd, a bit inebriated, stands there, having to observe this green blob running towards the stands. The people in the back have no choice but to wonder what this googly-eyed weirdo is doing waving his hands. The gesture is appropriate, but The Stanford Tree draws attention away from the game simply by not having a pleasing aesthetic. You’re left wondering why this moment of glory was preceded by a tree telling you, on the precipice of a blackout, to yell louder. What happens next? I’ll tell you in 25 years.

That is the magic of college mascots. They are a piece of the bigger lore to the school. Not everyone is lucky enough to afford a story as good as The University of Oregon. They were friends with Walt Disney and thus had been authorized to use Donald the Duck for inspiration for their team, The Ducks. Most people end up like Ohio State University’s Brutus Buckeye, who despite having a nut for a head becomes endearing once you accept that you’re looking at something born out of a need to rile up a crowd. It doesn’t matter because the cheerleaders doing flips is always far more impressive and the band running the field basically pushes the mascot into a proverbial locker. He’s there because he’s contractually obligated. How many of us can relate to the feeling of being somewhere we don’t want to be? It’s likely why most mascots have a gimmick if just to kill the misery.

But it was still wrong of him to kill Caesar

As an English major, creating characters is a necessity to forward a narrative. There is something about understanding what makes someone great or terrible. Great people are easy. They’re heroic, capable of great deeds and have audiences beckoning to their every call. In short, they’re really boring to write about. There is a need for push-and-pull, of conflict to arise. One needs to have some grey area to actually warrant a memorable story. Nowhere is that truer in the world of sports than with the mascot. 

The trombonist will graduate and next year they’ll play a different tune, but the mascot never leaves. Sure, many people don the outfit, but somebody put the effort into stitching the costume together, giving them an identity that comes with its own legend. Tryouts are no different than an actor auditioning for a film. They need to fit a specific build because the audience expects certain things. The quarterback can change plays, but the mascot is tied to this mortal coil in a way that makes his brief moments of attention crucial. The fact that this somehow applies to The Stanford Tree is delightfully bizarre.

Let’s go smaller for a bit. As of this publication, I have never attended a university. I have sat in The Walter Pyramid at Cal State Long Beach twice now and watched my home team The Beach lose to Cal State Fullerton’s The Titans at basketball, but I have not set foot in a classroom. I don’t have any credits. In some ways, it always has made me root for the underdog since community colleges rarely get the respect they deserve. I am a product of two schools in particular: Cypress College and Cerritos College. I dropped out of the first and graduated from the second, and it is amusing to think that I attended Cypress before Los Angeles decided to have a football team with the same name as The Chargers.

What I can say is that our Chargers mascot…

Look better than their Chargers mascot…

To be totally honest, I didn’t spend a lot of time when I was there being like “There goes Charger!” He was a phantom thread in the tapestry of the school. In fact, looking up the company that made him, The Mascot Company, was the first time that I knew that we had anything but a sentient Duracell battery running around games. There’s something delightful about looking at their portfolio page, or “Our Furry Friends,” where they give brief bios for each character’s creation. They have some professional names on there (T.D. of The Miami Dolphins), but it’s more interesting to look at characters like Bahama tourism mascot Swimming Pig, or anti-bullying hero Mushy the Martian. The world of mascots is far richer than one could initially expect, though the college circuit remains its own master class in self-mythologizing.

Much like Charger, I wasn’t aware that my other school had a mascot. I could imagine that Cerritos being The Falcons had a bird flying around, though I couldn’t point to the sky and say “There goes Franco!” I went during a time of major construction, so Franco probably got caught up in a Caterpillar crane or something. If anybody knows if Franco’s okay, please let me know.

With that said, I discovered upon research that unlike every mascot I’ve learned about, Franco has a legitimate backstory. This isn’t just that “We made him a falcon because Cerritos are Falcons.” It’s something much more wonderful. He doesn’t just have a story about how he flew to the college and made his nest atop the science labs. No, there is a story about how he’s a second-generation Falcon.

According to Cerritos College’s own website:

Once upon a time, Freddie and Frieda Falcon fell in love while attending Cerritos College. They earned 60 units and transferred south to Sky University. Freddie and Frieda married, had an egg, and out hatched a beautiful, blue baby Falcon. They named him Franco. 

When Franco graduated from high school, he decided his next step was to enroll at Cerritos College. Franco became very active and popular on campus. He joined the Pep Squad, the Scholars Honors Program, STEM, and became an active member of ASCC. He is majoring in Aerospace. 

Franco loves making new friends and being involved in campus events! Invite him to your next campus event!

It was at this point that I had to wonder: how many mascots have parents? There can’t be that many, though questioning where Cobber’s parents came from raises a lot of questions (they were stalkers). Still, the biography is so specific that it not only includes where they fell in love but how many units they earned and where they transferred to. Even then, it’s a bit dubious to say that Freddie and Frieda Falcon were all that smart if they flew “south” when Sky University is a trio of colleges west of there in South Korea: Seoul National University, Korea University, and Yonsei University. It may actually explain why Franco felt the need to overachieve by joining every prestigious group on campus. Then again, it never said that he graduated or is actually doing well in the classes, so there’s a good chance that this is all biting him in the ass.

The most delightful detail in all of this comes at the end. Unlike most mascots, Franco is a social creature who has his own hook-up page. You want Franco to show up at your on-campus birthday party? You can now make it a reality. You just have to say when and where, and if you have any special needs. Would Charger do that for you? Would The Stanford Tree do that for you? Not likely. Franco cares. He won’t let his potentially sinking grades keep him from you making the most of your college experiences. 

I love that Cerritos thought to add a whole level of mythology to their mascot that was more than random thematic pieces. It creates a deeper sense of character and identity. The school is as much a place for sports and academia as it is making lifelong relations. It warms your heart and suddenly you’re there on graduation day yelling from the stands “Atta boy, Franco!” You believe in his success both to lead the team to victory as he is in bettering his own life. Will he join his parents at Sky University? I guess. He doesn’t strike me as someone who doesn’t just copy his parents. Still, he proved that anything was possible if you applied yourself.

The world of mascots is too expansive to get into here, which is likely why I’ll continue to revisit it whenever something tickles my mind. I love this world where people try to form their own mythologies while doing something as basic as yelling towards a sporting event. The older I get, the more that I realize how much an average season of sports is its own story. It’s mostly focused on the players, but now and then you’ll be witnessing history with the mascot as they form new routines, etched into the stone of rituals. Like Batman, these characters have been interpreted hundreds of times over decades, and their malleable presence is evidence of the collective creative will. 

As an English major, I find it downright inspiring to look into the eyes of the mascots who look a bit… off and see someone brave and/or delusional enough to get up there and lead a team to victory. He’s more likely to be a punchline than a hero, but we all try to be our best selves, regardless of how many red marks we get. We’re greater than our errors, and sometimes it just means owning and accepting them. Sometimes it means trying to make the most of a terrible situation. Life is short, so why not just love The Stanford Tree? If you have a mascot you love out there, tell them that they matter today. I’m sure they will give you a high-five of appreciation in return.