The Wildcat is an issue. Your school isn't: it's putting some actual money into football, hired a good recruiter in Mark Stoops, and shows signs of real, verifiable commitment towards competing in the SEC. Your athletic director is even into Tumblr, and how many schools can say that? Besides LSU's, who's probably got some horrifying erotic tumblr you don't want to know about?
(Psst. It's definitely not boudinbooty.tumblr.com. And he definitely won't take submissions anonymously, and no dudes it's not that kind of tailgate.)
You have a lot of great things going for you at this point, and yet have the bad luck to be stuck with one of the worst default mascots in all of sports: the Wildcat.
That's a bobcat, not a Wildcat, so congratulations on not being just another team with a what amounts to a high-falutin' feral cat as your symbol. Your mascot doesn't make its living scavenging stray rodents and dodging a bowhunting Chipper Jones on the weekend. ("It's a tiger, Billy! Right here in Roswell!) That would be Kansas State's mascot, which translates to a sad football player so bad he cannot reveal his identity in public, and instead lives a double life as student and costumed feral cat.
But it's still just a Bobcat, and not even one that gets posed well enough to look cool. That WildBobFeralCat appears to have been stolen from a vast Chinese taxidermy diorama about exotic cats in a discotheque. He was the DJ, with one hand on the fader and another up in the air begging party felines that no, they didn't need water, because the roof could and would continue to burn, and also because they were all cats, and all hated water.
.Except for tigers, man. Tigers are weird, and we don't let them in the club anyway.
Winning football games will fix some of that. In the meantime, consider the following things to make the Wildcat slightly more intimidating than he is.
- posing only at full height when holding knives, because some people are terrified of guns, but everyone is terrified of knives
- always on fire all the time
- talks in Michael Ironside's voice
- motion sensor that, when triggered, says "mama loves you" in rick pitino's voice
- only appears held by Rich Brooks holding a royal flush and/or tumbler of smooth scotch in other hand
- basketball? (shrugs) (?)
- tape a bunch of insanity DVDs to him
- child-sized Christian Laettner jersey
- clever use of mirrors INFINITY WILDCATS FOREVER
- leave it in a dark room with something draped over it/ maybe someone thinks it's a ghost
- spread a rumor that it's Charles Robinson in a costume
- teardrop tats
- tape even more Insanity DVDs to him
- use a tank as your mascot and when someone asks where the wildcat is say "inside the tank" and then watch everyone run because nothing is scarier than a very stupid 20 pound wild cat trying to drive a thirty ton killing machine