The University of San Francisco is a staid enclave of higher learning, a rectangular hodgepodge of buildings gerrymandered to fill 19 square blocks of prime city real estate. It is a culturally and ethnically diverse educational operation and has been so for decades. Also, it has no football team to interfere with the peace and quiet of the place, and its men's basketball team has not been of national consequence in 45 years. In other words, it minds its business. So far, so good.
So it came as a bit of a jar when the school decided last Friday to change its mascot from a cartoon Spanish don—his name is Don Francisco, and he has both the requisite outsized biceps and a jaunty pencil-thin mustache of the kind last worn by Ronald Colman seven decades ago—to a wolf, an animal which is not particularly indigenous to any part of the city, save maybe the Financial District. Even then they could have just gone with Rapacious Bastards and sold a few more T-shirts when they roll out the new mascot next spring.
It has taken four years to implement this move, which began with a student government proposal to ditch the mascot in 2022. That became a petition signed by approximately 400 students, who correctly viewed the mascot as a representation of the Spanish colonization/brutalization of the indigenous population four centuries ago. All good, there; the student body should be the deciding vote on anything on campus that impacts mostly students. It's their house, after all.
But here's the hook: The school is still keeping the nickname "Dons," probably to keep old-school donors from taking back their money. All this does, really, is commit the student or students inhabiting the steroidal Don costume to inhabiting what we suspect will be an equally steroidal wolf costume. That buff new wolf will have a backstory of its own—a tie to Los Lobos de Loyola, the mascot on the 15th-century coat of arms of the Jesuits. Feel free to make your own historical objections to that on your own time.
Also, the wolf already sucks as an idea, which we will get to shortly.
This outcome is a rather disappointing half-measure all the way around, especially for those who remembered the uproar over Stanford abandoning the nickname Indians in 1972. The students preferred the nickname "Robber Barons," in tribute to 19th-century rich guy Leland Stanford, after whom the school was named and who was indeed that thing. The adults in the room, devoid as adults typically are of a sense of humor, instead declared that they would listen to the people who donated the money and declared their sports teams to be first the Cardinals and then simply Cardinal. In the process, the mascot went from, well, you know, to a disturbing anthropomorphic tree with no discernible sense of rhythm that looks as if it had been stung by the inhabitants of a hundred beehives and ate children at team rallies.
That argument was pretty great, because back then, fighting over nicknames and logos and mascots was fun and serious simultaneously. Even better, bitter old-timers rejected the change for decades out of sheer why-I-oughta obstinacy; this predictably had the effect of convincing the rest of us that angering the elderly rich is always worth the bother. That goofy tree never looked so dignified as it did in comparison to the people getting enraged about it.
More recently, Sonoma State University, roughly two hours and change north of Stanford, abandoned the nickname Cossacks for Seawolves in 2002, after history students remembered that the Cossacks, Russian horsemen of prior centuries, were notorious for carrying out pogroms against the local Jewish populations. Nobody seemed very bothered by that change, in part because Sonoma State is an unusually chill institution, and in part because they had initially thought about going with Condors as a mascot, despite there being none of those in Sonoma County. As there are few Russian horsemen still running rogue through the local vineyards, it was tough to gin up much energy over letting that name go.
The point to be made here is that the half-measure of keeping Dons but losing the costumed Don seems, well, kind of a half-arsed solution. If you're going to go deep on righting historical wrongs, even at this low level, go all the way. It would have been far better—or at least more entertaining to outsiders like us—to have dumped the whole "Dons" thing entirely, and tried to find something cooler and more student-driven. We like to think that the next generation, already up to their eyelids in the collective aftermath of preceding generations' mistakes and misdeeds, would be more adventurous in engaging with their surroundings, and more expansive in terms of mascot options.
And it could have been done. There are loads of examples. There are dozens of examples of schools ditching all manner of Native American insults, not to mention mascots who were caricatures of agricultural workers, religious warriors and clergymen, and, in the case of North Greenville University, rejecting Moonshiners and Black Widow Spiders for the more soporific Trailblazers.
Most schools that change their nicknames go generic when they do so, which misses the point of making one's surroundings one's own. A glorious few dare to be bold: UC Santa Cruz went from Sea Lions to Banana Slugs, Long Beach State from 49ers to The Beach (except for the baseball team, which is known as the Dirtbags), and Yakima Valley Indians to, naturally, Yaks. Others changed decades ago just out of a search for local coolness: Nebraska, which went for Cornhuskers after going through Bugeaters and Rattlesnake Boys, or Virginia Tech, now the Hokies after decades of being the Fighting Gobblers.
Others ditched religious imagery entirely: dozens of Crusader mascots either already discarded or endangered, USC dropping first Methodists and then Wesleyans to become the tiresome Trojans, and Southwestern College going from Methodists and Preachers to, of all things, Moundbuilders.
Fact is, nicknames comes and go with local whims, and branding is just a suggestion. USF had a chance to go weird—it is San Francisco, after all—and opted not to. Don The Wolf, if that is the name the mascot takes, is frankly a sad miss. Louisiana, formerly Louisiana Lafayette and before that Southwestern Louisiana, is the Ragin' Cajuns; their mascot is a cayenne pepper. Hawaii lets its teams pick their own nicknames. That's free thinking, but it is also thinking that reflects and respects the places it represents.
In short, USF can do better than a stupid wolf. It must do better than a stupid wolf. There are already Wolves, and Wolfpack, and Wolf Pack. There are Wolverines. There are Golden Wolves and Red Wolves and Gray Wolves. There are Timberwolves and Thunderwolves and Prairie Wolves. Enough with the wolf.
More to the point, there are also Goatboys and Mystics, Sasquatch and Yetis. There are Fighting Cacti, Geckos, and Gila Monsters, Fighting Salmon and Narwhals, Fighting Artichokes and Fighting Pickles, Rougarous and Gorloks. There are the Turtle Mountain Mighty Mikinocks and the Rhode Island School of Design Nads. The mind is a happy playground, and that's what college is for.
So good on USF for voting its conscience. But there is much more work to do before they reach their appropriate heights and depths. They should just be forewarned that Triceratops is already taken, too.
