Here’s a look at each state’s most popular college mascot genre: This one is blue because of some button I pushed in Paintbrush on accident. The most popular human is a Sword Guy, which includes Spartans, Trojans, Knights, and so on. That means America’s most common college mascot genres are Cats (15.9%) and Birds (15.5%), followed in the non-human animal genre by Dogs (6.8%), then Bears and Horses (3% each, and both in the Other Mammals section). The most common nickname is of the species Homo sapiens, but since this species includes everything from Battling Bishops (Ohio Wesleyan) to Keelhaulers (Cal Maritime), it makes sense to split the people mascots into smaller genres. First, let’s group all 1,875 nicknames into a few broad categories.
But first, what happens if we examine this national mascot census as a whole?įrom the Abilene Christian Wildcats through the Youngstown State Penguins, from the various Aggies through the Zips of Akron, here’s what we can learn from college nicknames as one big pile of data. Many of these names are individually amazing, and we’ll get into those at the end.
