The quarterfinals to crown the second-best Pac-12 mascot: Who voted for the damn Tree?
Helluva heel turn by a beloved WFC writer.
We’re hosting a tournament to crown the Pac-12’s second-best mascot. A team of WFC writers submitted our own votes to seed the mascots and we’re leaving the rest up to you.
Last week was the first round/the play-in round for the six mascots with the lowest seeding. Check out the bracket and the results below.
Things kicked off with a minor upset as #9 Wilbur and Wilma Wildcat narrowly defeated the live mascot of #8 Traveler. It looks like your hatred for USC overpowered your appreciation of the uniqueness of live mascots. At least we got some glue out of it.
Speaking of unique, the Pac-12’s most unique mascot was decisively handled in the most-lopsided match-up with #6 Harry the Husky moving on. As surprising as it was to see 3.5% of you vote for the #11 Tree, it was all the more surprising to see which WFC writer betrayed us all by ranking the Tree anything but 11 during our seeding process.
While I do share his appreciation for unique mascots—I can’t recommend checking out that Twitter thread enough—the total abysmal “lol random” execution of the Tree is just too much for me to handle. Despite the WFC readers calling for this voter—at the time anonymous—to be banned, tarred, and feathered for his indiscretion, Nick is far to great to lose.
Our final contest was also fairly one-sided with the WTF that is #7 Sparky taking down the wannabe that is #10 Joe and Josie Bruin. Maybe one day you or your damn bloggers could muster up a fraction of creativity and originality in the waste of space known as your existence. Probably not.
With that, all of the Californian mascots have been bumped from the tournament and failed to make it past the play-in round. Let’s take a look at the contests that comprise our quarterfinals.
Can the upset-minded Wilbur and Wilma Wildcat do it again or will the #9 seed get trampled by top-seeded Ralphie? Vote now!
It should be a close one as #4 Benny Beaver faces #5 Swoop; this is the only contest of the quarterfinals not to involve a play-in team. Vote now!
The college football world is wondering if the 2020 season will happen without exception or if it would necessitate some radical change to accommodate the coronavirus, but who expected potentially playing the season early? Well, that’s happening here with the Apple Cup being played in the spring of 2020 as #3 Butch T. Cougar takes on its in-state rival, #6 Harry the Husky. Vote now!
We close the quarterfinals with #7 Sparky and #2 The Duck. Something tells me this would be a tougher decision if we could use the Roboduck here. Vote now!
Twitter polls are open, so go vote in the links above.
In response to OldSoCalBear's request for the link to the Stanfurd Tree falling down: looks like the original video's gone. Fortunately, I saved a copy to laugh at every once in a while.
Quality's worse than the original, but here it is: https://youtu.be/HrJMTuPSqtE
This is a touchy subject I realize, but we have a serious issue with Oski in his current form. Poor guy scares the crap out of people from it's 40's styling to his lackluster antics (I miss the Oski who tackled the Tree at a basketball game!).
We did an event years ago in downtown SF with both Oski and the Stanfurd Tree. The Oski group were a bunch of curmudgeons while the Tree was up for anything!
So, I wish we could start some thinking about updating Oski for the coming years to something more inspiring, more exciting, and more competitive - poor ol' bear gets about the least amount of TV airtime of any mascot short of Santa Cruz's Banana Slugs.
JMHO.
#GoBears