Au Shucks!

The decision by Marquette to change its team nicknames to the Gold is still being panned by the university community.

Yesterday, there was a protest on campus attended by about 100 people in spite of the rain. The university president went out and answered some questions to nobody's satisfaction.

Opinion polls are running over 90% negative. But, as Father Wild said yesterday, and I'm definitely paraphrasing here, get used to it and get over it, because we're not changing it.

Also, it occurs to me that I forgot to chime in with my opinion yesterday, which is what I get for doing this when I'm still a little pre-caffeinated. I think it's a dumb name, even worse than the one they had before. I like the color gold, but I wouldn't want it to be my team nickname.

This is the classic case of a bad idea that is poorly executed. The trustees opened up a can of worms by even revisiting the nickname issue. There is a large constituency that wants them to go back to Warriors, and those people won't be pleased with any other choice. The trustees spent a year supposedly discussing whether to do just that, or stick with Golden Eagles. When the new name was announced, it caught everyone by surprise because nobody knew other names were even being considered, and nobody outside the board of trustees was apparently consulted.

That's what is going to give this protest legs. You have Warrior people who won't be happy with anything else and you have a new and unimproved name that the rest of the folks feel has been thrust upon them.

Father Wild may have told them it wasn't going to change, but we'll see. Unless it's a moral issue, it's hard to stick with something when over 90% of the people you serve are against it.

Here are links to a couple of funny columns about the name change.

This one has just about every conceivable one-liner about Gold and this one suggests color-coded nicknames for the Big Ten schools.