From Aggies to Zips

[sigma7]

So I've been hammering away at Excel to whip up a list of colleges and nicknames. I don't know Excel well enough, and I figured it'd be an interesting exercise to come up with a list and frequency for collegiate nicknames -- we know there are more Wildcats than Owls, but how many?

Armed with the data from this Web site, made a spreadsheet, then spent a while trying to create an intelligent count of the unique nicknames. That took me the longest time, but having solved it, I'd like to share my findings.

There were 1617 nicknames, 539 distinct -- some schools (like Georgia Tech and Hofstra) have multiple nicknames, and some schools have different nicknames for gendered sports teams (Lyon College, University of Central Arkansas) and even different sports (the Haverford College baseball team is the Black Squirrels). There are 354 mascots unique to their college, from the Ambassadors to the Zips. Your top ten mascots are the Eagles (61), Panthers (52), Tigers (45), Bulldogs (39), Wildcats (37), Lions (34), Cougars (32), Pioneers [!] (31), Warriors (30) and Knights (26). There are still teams called the Red Men (Carthage College; Carthago delenda est?) and the Redmen (University of Rio Grande), five Indians, and one Seminoles. Seven teams are in some way purple, 22 red, 35 blue, five black, 53 gold, seven green, 18 yellow, and one white -- the White Mules of Colby College, Waterville, Maine. There are two Bees, one Super Bees, one Maccabees. Two Squirrels, one Black Squirrels (as above).

Disclaimers: "Fighting" has been dropped from the nicknames. Geographically distinct campuses get counted as separate colleges (Davenport University accounts for 20 of the 52 Panthers). There are 160 colleges tabulated that have no official nickname, including several incarnations of DeVry University. Surely they should be the Infomercials.

Comments

[erica-roo.livejournal.com]

How many Beavers? I know we have a community college with that mascot and our high school mascot was the beaver... and so I am curious if other schools have gone that route, since you probably can't answer the real question: WHY?!!! I would so rather have been a Black Squirrel.

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Both MIT and Caltech are Beavers, on the basis that it's nature's engineer with all the dam building.

[kansel01.livejournal.com]

I like to think you misspelled that and meant 'damn.'

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it sounds like an engineering mantra....

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

Would you believe ten beavers? (And that's terrible.)

• Babson College (Wellesley, Massachusetts)


• Bemidji State University (Bemidji, Minnesota)


• Bluffton University (Bluffton, Ohio) (former name: Bluffton College)


• Buena Vista University (Storm Lake, Iowa)


• California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, California)


• Champlain College (Burlington, Vermont)


• City College of New York-City University of New York (New York, New York)


• Minot State University (Minot, North Dakota)


• Oregon State University (Corvallis, Oregon)


• University of Maine-Farmington (Farmington, Maine)

Interesting references to both Bemidji and Minot. That's gotta be some kinda record.

It appears that the official athletic nickname for MIT is "Engineers" (which it shares with four other schools) -- though its animal mascot is, indeed, the beaver. Compare and contrast with Stanford, which changed its nickname from "Indians" to "Cardinal" -- not the bird, but the color, and has an unofficial mascot, the Stanford Tree.