The first set of second round matches have been completed, and another purple nuisance has emerged. I’m flattered to have a big following from Kenyon on the blog, but they have ousted the Scotty dogs, and nobody likes someone who kills a dog. Other than that, the round 2 matches went pretty much as I would expect them two, with a couple NESCAC mascots stampeding their way into the Elite Eight. Here is the updated bracket. (I trimmed some of the fat so the bracket was easier to make).
You know what’s coming: it’s to complete the round of 16. There are only four matches left, so here they are:
8. Wisconsin-Whitewater Warhawks vs. 4. North Carolina Wesleyan Battling Bishops
A couple weeks ago, the Warhawks mobilized their massive, public-school fan base to stun a clearly-superior mascot in the Purple Cows. If that’s what they can do against one of the best mascots in the country, I’m scared to see what they do to a mascot like the Bishops.
I’m actually pretty surprised NCW made it through the first round, but I’m glad they did. Their logo is pretty awesome, despite not being an accurate representation of what a bishop actually looks like. I also find it incredibly endearing that their players embraced their own foreign-ness by purposefully mispronouncing their mascot’s name during matches. (If you haven’t seen them play, they yell “Bee-shops”). If they’re going to have a chance against the Warhwaks, however, they’re going to have to learn to attack horizontally… They’re screwed.
6. Trinity (CT) Bantams vs. Whittier Poets
Judging by the vote totals from two weeks ago, I severely underestimated how awesome people think the Trinity mascot is. Make no mistake, I always thought the Bantam was cool, but something about the logo and the navy-maize color scheme turned me off on them a little bit. Nevertheless, it appears the Bantams are poised to join their unique NESCAC brethren in the Elite Eight. If only their tennis team was half as good as their squash team.
On the other side of this matchup are the Poets. Whittier did well to get past Amherst in the first round, and they are definitely an up-and-coming mascot, but they still need a couple more years of experience training at the college level before their ready to compete with the top half of the SCIAC. They have a hard time recruiting good mascots against their conference rivals with better academics and better facilities, but they have some good mascot-related momentum going into this season. They have a ton of potential to pull off a couple upsets this year, and they might as well start off by beating a big bird on Thanksgiving week. I’m still going with the cocks.
8. Kalamazoo Hornets vs. 4. Whitman Squirrels
I don’t actually have much to say about this matchup, so I’ll use this space to pose a question: has anyone ever heard of a team using either the giraffes or the hippopotamuses as a mascot? I heard of a team that went by the camels, and it made me think of all the popular animals that just aren’t used. Can you imagine how intimidated you would be going up against the koalas? Those things are vicious. The platypuses? I would hurt myself in confusion. Mooses? Meese? You get where I’m going with this.
Anyways, I was pretty surprised the hornets made it through the first round, sure they have a fierce-looking mascot and a decent color scheme, but absolutely nothing about them jumps out to me as AWESOME. Unless these guys are Africanized, they can’t even really hurt you without killing themselves. On the other side, pretty much everything about the Whitman Squirrel jumps out at me as awesome. Even without replacing that racquet with an AK47, that thing could DEFINITELY give you rabies. Gotta go with the squirrels for now.
3. UCSC Banana Slugs vs. 2. Claremont-Mudd-Scripps Stags
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before… Santa Cruz and CMS are playing against each other in the Round of 16. Since it happens almost every year on the tennis court, it’s only fitting that it would happen in this random mascot bracket.
On the court, the Stags have owned the Sweet Sixteen matches of late, but I don’t think that will translate to success on the mascot battlefield. The Stag mascot has so much potential, but the graphic designing folks at CMS had to ruin it by rolling out this mess of a logo. It’s too bad they don’t use this one more often. You can go cute, or you can go intimidating, but you can’t have both in the same logo.
The Slugs, on the other hand, know how to walk the line between cute and ironically intimidating. Since we haven’t gone there in a while, I want to offer a potential script for a fight between the Stag and the Slug. One would think that the Stag would just step on the slug and it would be over, but I’m thinking the Slug would just eat the cauliflower coming out of the Stag’s nose, slug his way through his nostrils, and ninja his brain. Just sayin’.