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Never Fear: Ole Miss’s Non-Ackbar Mascot Ideas Are Just As Ridiculous

Jun 28, 2010, 8:12 PM UTC

â†µAfter discontinuing the Colonel Sanders-like Colonel Reb in 2003, Ole Miss is looking for a mascot a little more modern than a plantation owner as part of a wide-ranging effort to seem less faintly racist to outsiders—they also stopped playing “Dixie” recently. â†µ

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â†µA spoiler for our personal preference on the new Ole Miss mascot.
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â†µâ†µTheir campaign saw an internet-celebrated push for Admiral Ackbar that unfortunately fell foul to copyright law and Mississippi’s general desire to not be the dorkiest college in the country. (If Georgia Tech was looking for a new mascot, on the other hand…) Students threatened to transfer, parents declared their children would go elsewhere, and the ridiculous idea died with the appointment of a student committee: â†µ

â†µâ†µâ‡¥â†µâ‡¥Officials say there’s virtually no chance the fish-faced leader of the Rebel Alliance in the movie could become the on-field mascot for the Rebels of Ole Miss.â†µâ‡¥
â†µâ‡¥â†µâ‡¥The Associated Student Body president dismisses it as “comic relief.”â†µâ‡¥

â†µâ†µâ†µBut not all is lost, because the student committee’s just released a number of possibilities, many sublimely ridiculous. There’s even an anthropomorphic ocean-going creature up for consideration: â†µ

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REBEL LAND SHARK
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â†µâ‡¥The Rebel Land Shark loves to wear the Rebel “red & blue” and when any Ole Miss team has a big play, the Land Shark enjoys dancing to the “Jaws” theme song. He is a very friendly character – except when someone challenges any Rebel athletics team.â†µâ‡¥
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â†µâ†µIf the “land” shark comes with a floppy hat and a cane a la Colonel Reb, I’m sold. Other possibilities include Olypmics-mascot-style terror abstractions named “Hotty” and “Toddy,” a black bear (extinct in Mississippi) a cardinal (highly original), a horse, a lion (“Rebellion”—get it?), a titan (the scary Greek proto-god version) and the intangible concept of mojo. All of these have the commendable quality of being irrelevant, but they are all boring next to a mustachioed, seersucker-wearing shark. â†µ

â†µâ†µThey’re all goofy, though. With the threat of an unremarkable conventional mascot like such Mississippi institutions as the blues musician and the riverboat pilot, chances are Ole Miss will end up saddled with something absurd, at which point the Ackbar backlash backlash can proceed. â†µ

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This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.

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