FIUFan wrote:
panther97 wrote:
How ' bout, FIU/MIAMI? FIUM. Easy fix; we could all just add an M to all of our stuff with a magic marker. And bring back Sunblazers, for all the reasons CC cited. If not Sunblazers, then something else unique and South Florida that sets us apart.
Why? Home many schools have a mascot that is unique and sets them apart. For the most part they are some type of predator or bird of prey.
And just say no to Sunblazer. It's a made up word that says nothing about us or S. Florida but tries to describe what the sun does (and it also sounds too much like an aritcle of clothing

).
I understand where you're coming from... but to me, the fact it's unique off-sets the fact it's a made-up word. The only other school with a nickname like that is UAB and even then, it's not really the same.
Besides... when you have a made-up name like that, you can pretty much define it how you want. I think that's a great thing in this case. A good marketing campaign could make some serious hay with that.
Plus... FIU's teams used to be the Sunblazers. The history is there. I think having some sort of connection to the past would be a good thing, especially if you're going to change the school name.
Also... it likely brings Son of a Blazer back. Nothing against Roary, but S.O.B. is way cooler.
One final point. Look at minor league baseball's mascots. There's all kinds of goofy ones. Biscuits, Flying Squirrels, Blue Wahoos, Mudcats, Threshers... and that's just off the top of my head. Most of the time, the names were chosen because they were unique. It was a ploy to sell merchandise and to build community pride in the team. For the most part, it works.
I'll give you a personal example that I've been covering at my current job. In Daytona Beach, the long-time minor league baseball club changed its mascot recently from the Cubs to the Tortugas. The name change was forced because Chicago (NL) moved their Single-A ops to Myrtle Beach and Cincinnati took over.
Team officials decided even before the Reds came in that they weren't going to take the parent club name. They wanted to build an identity that could go through affiliation changes and bring something unique.
They came up with the Tortugas name around 3 months later and the local reaction at first was... mixed. At best. A lot of people had gotten used to the Cubs, but there was also complaints about it being Spanish and hard to say for the non-Latino populations. Not to mention the obvious complaints of it being a turtle.
(In case you're curious... Volusia County gets a lot of sea turtles during nesting season, so that's why the name. The Spanish twist was because the team officials thought it sounded better and was more unique than the Turtles.)
By the time the season started a few months later, though, people were used to it. And merch sales went through the roof. The team made more money off merch in the first half of the season than they had the entire year prior. Seeing Tortuga gear around Daytona now is not uncommon, I'll just put it that way.
The Tortugas also won some pretty prestigious awards for how the campaign was implemented as well as for the mascot and uniform design. Including a fan vote on MiLB.com.
So... I'm just throwing that out there for consumption. I know Miami's not Daytona Beach and college isn't minor league baseball, but I think some of the lessons could definitely apply.