In the spirit of college football and mascots, which I started writing about in my last piece, I went out and I bought “NCAA Football 10.” I wanted to know if those mascots looked just as ugly in the game; if they looked like they’d been dreamed up by a strung-out professor, that is. I wanted to know if the game even had them at all, showing the world how ugly some of them were. I thought EA might be afraid that, if someone saw the jaundiced, French Fry-shrouded head of a certain mascot, sales would plummet.
I found out three things that have quickly become the most important things in my life:
1. The game does, in fact, have the mascots.
2. You can play football games as the mascots.
3. You should never tell your girlfriend that the two most important things in your life are the two I’ve listed above.
Seriously, though, it’s awesome. You can pick the team you want and also pick that you want to play as mascots, not players, and there it is. They take the field. Whole lines of Spartys and Lions and Trojans.
I felt awesome for having discovered something so undoubtedly cool, and then I felt everything but awesome for how excited I was getting. I felt a little pathetic. I felt like the neighbors could look in and see me, kneeling on the floor in front of the television, slowly bowing and chanting and clapping a bit off-beat in devote honor. So I closed the door and the shades and got on with it.
For the sake of testing it out (how could we not? That would have been like finding the Fountain of Youth and not taking a drink, like finding your father’s vodka and, well, not taking a drink. Both of those examples are pretty much the same, when you get right down to it) two of my roommates chose the West Virginia Mountaineers and the Florida Gators. We got a few beers (you try worshiping a television for half an hour without ceasing; you’ll want a beer, too) and settled in.
The Gator was fat. It was fat and green and when it ran it seemed to trundle along like a sixth-grader who has played nothing but Nintendo his whole life, eating Hot Pockets by the pound, and then has been handed a real football and told to go for it (before you get any ideas, I was not that kid. I was not. I swear it. Really. For real. I promise). It wasn’t slow, of course, but it was just so big that it looked slow. The only one that looked fast was Tim Teb -excuse me, Quarterback Number Fifteen.
The Mountaineer was, most disappointingly, not the full-size SUV. That would have been a game, I thought. Instead, he was a little man who looked a lot like Daniel Boone looked. He had on a fur cap and leather everything (not that kind of leather - the tan-brown kind that still looks somewhat like animal hide) and a fanny pack. Well, not a fanny pack, per se, but a shoulder pack. It was made out of leather, too, and looked like it was meant to hold a lunch. And it was convenient, I thought, because that way Mark Sanchez could play and know he’d never get bored the way he did last week against the Oakland Raiders (see this if you don’t know what I’m talking about):
(There is nothing worse to be found. Unless Tom Cable can create it, which he’s trying to do as hard as he can).
The Gators won. Of course they did. I think that bit was hard-wired into the game.
More on ugly mascots next month. Starting and finishing with the Buckeye. Both because I’m from Michigan and because it deserves it. Anything that looks like I ate it and then passed it again deserves about all the hate I can muster up.
BYLINE:
Jonathan Schlosser is a writer and part-time library worker. He has published some short fiction and is working on finding a publisher for his novel. He has a B.A. in Writing, which means that, for a living, he is allowed to put away books at the library. He is also allowed to tell parents to tell their children to be quiet. He lives in Grand Rapids, MI. Email Jonathan at jonathan@zoiksonline.com.
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