March Madness Mascot Challenge

It’s March Madness! But don’t forget about the mascots.

Since Yale University introduced the first collegiate mascot, a bulldog named Harper (followed by Handsome Dan), in the 1890s, other colleges and universities have adopted their own symbols and monikers to draw attention to their schools—creating a cavalcade of Bears, Huskies, Badgers, Aggies, Orangemen, and Wolverines. But which mascot is the best? For this, Encyclopædia Britannica created a contest for the ages in 2025—the March Madness Mascot Challenge.

To keep things both current and manageable, we narrowed the choices to mascots from the surviving teams in the NCAA men’s Sweet Sixteen and pitted them against one another in a single-elimination contest where readers helped to decide the winner. And, since nothing is ever as easy as it should be, for teams with names that are, shall we say, a little inventive (looking at you, Duke), we leaned on either the animal used for the mascot or the closest historical definition.

As this year’s Mascot Challenge played out, the original 16 teams narrowed to 8 and then to four. During the semifinal round, one of the games featured wildcat vs. wildcat, with those of the University of Arizona booking a convincing win over those from the University of Kentucky by a 24-percent vote margin! In the other match-up, the wolverines (University of Michigan) edged out the terrapins (University of Maryland) with just over 51 percent of the vote. The wolverines went on to win the 2025 March Madness Mascot Challenge by beating the wildcats, garnering 64.8 percent of the vote in the final game.