Yesterday, Marquette University made itself the laughing stock of the colleges in the area. For those of you that don’t know the story, Marquette has been in a constant discussion about what their “name” should be for years. It used to be the Marquette Warriors, but many people found that offensive to the Native Americans. So, a few years back, they changed their names to the Marquette Golden Eagles. Both alumni and students got in a tizzy about that, thinking the name was lame and that they should change it back to the Warriors.

The 10 years of discussion regarding changing the name back to the Warriors came to a head last year at their graduation (I think), when an alumni shocked the college during a graduation speech by telling the community that he would pledge a few million dollars to the college if they changed the name back to Warriors.

I don’t think anyone really thought that they would change the name back to Warriors. They are a Catholic college who wants to be as politically correct as possible, and changing it back to Warriors would burn too many bridges and offend too many people. But at the same time, I don’t think anyone thought that they would completely change the name.

To the MARQUETTE GOLD??? COME ON!!

What is that mascot going to look like? In an article on jsonline.com today, they said that some other schools, such as Stanford and Syracuse, associate themselves with colors (Red and Orange), so this isn’t completely out of wack.

I know that Marquette is joining a new conference this year and that they are trying to make a grand entrance, but I really don’t think this is the way to do it. What do you think about the new mascot? Cool? Dumb? Don’t care either way?

Update: Neill sent me some links to other sites that have some pretty good opinions regarding the nickname.

http://www.gop3.com/
http://mu-warrior.blogspot.com/

And jsonline.com has one of the best opinion polls that I have seen. Over 21,000 people have voted and here are the results:

Question: So … do you like the nickname ‘Gold’?
Results: No: 93.7% Yes: 6.3%