The NCAA has banned the use of “hostile or abusive” team names in post-season competition.
However, and here’s the catch, you can still use them for regular season play. The NCAA’s ability to project political correctness only extends as far as their direct authority, and that’s those lucrative tournaments you watch to avoid dealing with the family over News Year’s.
So if you’ve got a really lousy team, a booster club who can’t stop writing checks for sports cars and hookers, or a Board of Governors who are under the mistaken impression that budgets should be reserved for academics instead of athletics, you can pretty much have any mascot you darn well want.
I’d like to see one of those schools thumb their noses at the Establishment. Call yourselves “The Cheap Jews” or “The Deranged Soccermoms” or “The Mad Arabs” or “Crazy Horny Greeks.” Just as long as you’ve got a big enough endowment, don’t depend on state funding, and you’ve got plenty of freshmen to wear the costume on the sidelines nothing can go wrong. (Hint – reinforce the oversized head with Kevlar to protect from snipers in the lights.)
There’s also the loophole that if you’re insulting a minority that doesn’t exist, you can still keep the nickname. I guess this means we’ll have to wait for First Contact before the California University of Pennsylvania and the University of Hawaii-Hilo have to change their team names from the Vulcans.
By the way, word is that Dan Rather really hated being called an anchorman. He’d insist on being called a reporter or correspondent when the opportunity arose. Does this mean that Puget Sound Christian College and Rhode Island College are now frozen out of tournament play for calling their teams “Anchormen” ?