Adam Joshua Smargon is a 31-year-old PhD candidate at the University of New Hampshire, and he is obsessed with college nicknames.
Ask him which is the most common. He replies quickly. Frantically, even.
"I knew you were going to ask that," he says. "It's Eagles, including all varieties, of course (Golden Eagles, Screaming Eagles, etc.)"
Smargon also knows the story behind the Fighting Banana Slugs of UC Santa-Cruz, the Fighting Artichokes of Scottsdale Community College and the Hustlin' Owls of the Oregon Institute of Technology.
Whether or not you give a hoot, college monikers have become a hot issue again, now that the NCAA has put 30 schools under review for mascots, nicknames and logos that could be deemed offensive to Native Americans. Indiana University (Pa.) is one of the schools under review, because its nickname is Indians.
Maybe more institutions should just avoid the hassle and follow the example set by Webster (Mo.) University, which invented its own nickname: Gorlocks.
According to the school's Web site, a Gorlock is a mythical creature -- designed by staff and students -- which has "the paws of a speeding cheetah, the horns of a fierce buffalo and the face of a dependable Saint Bernard."
Smargon was sitting in a computer lab a decade ago at the University of Florida, "bored out of my skull," when he decided to compile a list of college nicknames. He created a web page, and folks started e-mailing him like crazy with new entries.
Soon, the list grew to Gorlock-like proportions.
"I used to have the whole thing memorized," Smargon said Tuesday in a phone interview that won't soon be forgotten on this end.
There are only two rules for joining Smargon's list: The school must confer a bachelor's degree and must be in the United States. A trip to his Web site ( www.smargon.net/nicknames/ ) left me wondering if this was a joke.
But, as Smargon himself put it, "I couldn't make these up."
These are real nicknames:
Sounds like one of Pitt's non-conference schedules.
