Name-a-Day Calendar, May 3: Montana State Bobcats

Page 178 of 365

Chosen in: 1916

Chosen by: Exponent editor-in-chief Lester Cole and sports editor Fred Bullock

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What is now Montana State University was founded in 1893 as the Agricultural College of the State of Montana. They began playing intercollegiate sports around the turn of the 20th century,¹ their first teams usually unofficially called the Aggies or the Farmers on account of the school’s agricultural focus.

By 1915, the staff of the Exponent student newspaper wanted something that packed a little more punch, so they solicited nickname suggestions from the student body. The paper received several suggestions—Cowpunchers, Coyotes, Mavericks, and Outlaws among them—but they didn’t like any of them, so a couple staff members took it upon themselves to pick a nickname.

Those staff members were editor-in-chief Lester Cole and sports editor Fred Bullock. They wanted something both fierce and local to Montana, so they got to thinking of animals with a fighting spirit that weren’t already used as mascots by another university in the area; Montana was already using some form of bear at the time,² so those were out of the question. Their pick, announced in the Exponent in January 1916, was the bobcat, known for its “cunning intelligence, athletic prowess, and independent spirit”.

Montana State currently has a costumed bobcat mascot named Champ. Here he is in another painfully 2011 video.

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1. Football in 1897; men’s basketball in 1901

2. At this time, the Montana teams were almost interchangeably called either the Bruins or the Grizzlies. Today, they’re just the latter.