The Worst College Sports Mascots Of All Time

College life, or the time spent living on campus and doing the usual and traditional college things in the United States, is a unique experience, representing a crossroads between youth and adulthood. College campuses are almost entirely populated by people in their late teens and early twenties living away from home and beyond the influence of their parents for the first time — young adults who can cut loose, figure out their identity, and get goofy, just before the onset and onslaught of adulthood makes them have to get serious.

This pervading vibe can make college a very weird place, particularly in the unifying experience of sports. Students may show pride for their team by attending games with their bodies painted team colors, engaging in strange old game day rituals, and wildly celebrating wins and rioting after losses. And through it all, they're cheered on by their mascot, a fellow student wearing a colorful costume that's the living embodiment of the team's nickname. Generally, these are imposing things, like Tigers, Lions, or Bears. And sometimes, they're as silly as college itself can be. Here are the worst — by which we mean the funniest, strangest, and most baffling — college mascots in America.

If a mascot is supposed to intimidate opponents and/or get fans on its own team's side fired up, it stands to reason that a vegetable won't get the job done, particularly one as polarizing and prohibitive as the artichoke, with its hearts dug out and used as a pizza topping or an entry on an antipasti platter, or its leaves individually torn off and dipped in butter. Not many schools have a vegetable, let alone an artichoke, at the center of its mascot lore, but then they don't have the history of Arizona's Scottsdale Community College.

In the early 1970s, the campus of SCC was rocked by ideological clashes between students and the administration. Intending to embarrass the institution and call attention to what it saw as unwise budget decisions, the student body officially installed Artie the Artichoke as the SCC mascot. Over the years, the controversy surrounding his creation softened, and now Artie is as beloved by students and staff as any other college's mascot.

The Rhode Island School of Design is an art school, which means its students are almost guaranteed to get extra creative when it comes to naming the institution's few sports teams and its mascots. According to Mel Magazine, the fencing team is the Pricks, and the basketball team bears the extremely tongue-in-cheek and double entendre moniker of Balls. (The cheerleaders, because they offer support to the Balls, are known as the Jockstraps.) Taking a cue from the Balls, the hockey team calls itself the Nads, adopting the name in 1961 so fans in the stands could shout "Go Nads!" — as in gonads, yet another name for the human testicles.

Despite the allure of the chant, attendance at hockey games fell off in the 1990s, and in 2001, team captain Brian Chesky (who would later co-create Airbnb) helped create and adopt a team mascot. Taking the whole male-genitalia concept to an absurd and literal height, the mascot for the Nads is Scrotie, an anthropomorphized warrior who is also the complete package of penis and testicles, rendered very realistically. (Scrotie is a play on "scrotum.")

"Orange" is a word with two primary meanings, and they're often interchangeable. It refers to a common color as well as to the citrus fruit that inspired the color's name. This linguistic flexibility benefited Syracuse University, where the sports teams play under the name the Orange. Per its website, the school was founded in New York State in 1870, and that athletic name is quite old-fashioned. Adopted in 1890, according to the school's traditions page, the Orange is akin to the Cincinnati Reds or the Cleveland Browns — a name that's also a color, and Syracuse's one and only official color at that.

So when the time came to represent the Orange as a mascot that could appear at sports events as a costumed creature, it was a quick mental jump for Syracuse's organizers to come up with an orange Orange orange. Syracuse's chief rallying agent is a character named Otto the Orange, and he's a big, fuzzy orange Orange, decked out in a blue baseball cap bearing a big orange "S" for Syracuse.

The Evergreen State College, founded in Olympia, Washington, in the countercultural-dominant era of the late 1960s, proudly boasts a contrarian streak. The school doesn't issue letter grades, but rather written evaluations, and encourages students to design their own academic major. To that end, the school's mascot is the geoduck — specifically, a character named Speedy the Geoduck. Found commonly in Puget Sound near Olympia's campus, the geoduck (pronounced "gooey-duck") is the largest burrowing clam in the world, its name deriving from a Lushootseed word that means "dig deep" (per the school's website). The clam, a two-pounder that just so happens to strike a phallic image, sticks its siphons down as much as 3 feet into the sand. Once they're down there, they stay put, making the nickname "Speedy" particularly funny and ironic.

According to the college, Speedy, and the geoduck itself, represent the school's inherent and self-proclaimed revolutionary values. The geoduck is reportedly vulnerable and not at all aggressive, and thus "the opposite of big sports obsession at traditional college," as the college explains. Speedy, a student in a costume that features Muppet-like bug eyes, a green shell, and gloves, can often be spotted goofing off at Evergreen's very casual club sporting events.

While gargoyles often appear as monstrous, toothy, pointy-eared, troll-like dragons perched atop old, tall buildings, they're actually just a decorative and creative way to keep rainwater from damaging exterior walls. Before contemporary gutter systems were developed, gargoyles were used to reroute rain, preventing it from running right down a building's stone walls and causing erosion, according to Wonderopolis.

An architectural feature that helpfully stops water erosion from ruining a structure, rendered as a silent, immovable beast, doesn't evoke the usual qualities of a mascot: fierce and active. And yet there exists Kaboom!, the explosively named mascot for Bradley University. When the Illinois institution started building its campus in 1897, founder Lydia Moss Bradley hired collegiate architect Henry Ives Cobb, who employed the gothic style, which uses a lot of gargoyles. They became a distinctive part of Bradley, leading to their adoption as a mascot for its Bradley Braves sports teams. The stationary creature got its name, Kaboom!, from basketball announcer Dave Snell, who emphasized big moments in the school's basketball games with that exclamation.

The Georgia Institute of Technology, more commonly known as Georgia Tech, is a major research and study institution in the fields of science and machinery. And while its official team name is the Yellow Jackets, the Georgia Tech mascot is the Ramblin' Reck — a non-living, mechanical example of the kind of ingenuity they display at the university, albeit a misspelled one. The Ramblin' Reck is a very old car. Since 1961, according to the Georgia Tech traditions page, a 1930 Ford Model A Sport Coupe, flanked by cheerleaders, has preceded the school's football team onto the field for home games.

The original Ramblin' Reck (which rhymes nicely with "Georgia Tech") was a 1914 Model T from the personal collection of a Georgia Tech dean, Professor Floyd Field. Floyd had driven the car regularly and been hard on it, and students working in a campus auto body shop restored it in 1926, leading to a series of cars that also took part in races and parades.