When you mess with college football traditions, you start to run into a lot of pushback. That’s why people traditionally testy whenever someone says that we might not want to have live mascots during sporting events, especially animals that are big enough that if they decide they want to disobey their handler, no one is going to be able to stop them.
We’ve seen a few incidents play out in recent seasons that have been caused some concern. Texas’ Bevo the longhorn steer decided to run through a barricade in order to get its horns on Georgia’s Uga the bulldog before last season’s Sugar Bowl.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQujv1qThUE
A few weeks back, Auburn running back JaTarvious Whitlow took off on a 30-yard touchdown run against the Mississippi State Bulldogs and slid out of bounds right into their mascot, Bully the bulldog. He was not happy about it.
This Saturday, during the second quarter of the game between the Oklahoma Sooners and West Virginia Mountaineers, the Sooner Schooner, a wagon carrying RUF/NEK Lil’ Sis members pulled by two ponies named Boomer and Sooner, tipped over after the horses decided to make a quick turn back towards the sidelines and the wagon wheel got jammed.
It did rain last night which affected the grass on the field and has led to multiple divots that may have attributed to the fall as well. One of the RUF/NEK Lil’ Sis riders was shaken up on the fall and was helped off the field by others in the spirit squad. Thankfully it doesn’t appear anyone was severely injured. The ponies broke off and ran into the endzone where they were halted safely.
The game is being broadcast by Fox which means that Gus Johnson is on the call. And that means Gus had to do some Gus things on the replay.
Current state of the Schooner. pic.twitter.com/KLq9AtFp2w
— Joe Mussatto (@joe_mussatto) October 19, 2019
Someone is bound to bring up that maybe we don’t need to run a couple of ponies through a loud football stadium and someone could just pull the Schooner. And others are bound to get mad about that suggestion. And round and round we’ll go.
