The return of college football is right around the corner, with fall camps under way across the country and preseason polls beginning to trickle out. And in the wildest and wackiest sport in America, that can only mean one thing: It's mascot season, baby.
Anthropomorphized fruit? Absolutely. Live animals roaming the sideline in a way that almost certainly wouldn't fly if somebody pitched it today? You bet. No one does mascots like college football — and if you can dream it, the odds are pretty good that some school somewhere is rocking it.
But just how well do you know the entire constellation of ducks, demon deacons and dragons? Prove your expertise and get ready for the 2026 campaign by taking the quiz below and seeing how many mascots you can match to the schools they represent.
College football quiz: Can you name which program each iconic mascot belongs to?
The stories behind the weirdest mascots in FBS
Purdue Pete (Purdue University)
All due respect to boilermaking as a profession, but, uh ... did Pete really need to have such completely vacant eyes? Why does he have a hard, plastic head attached to a human body? And who decided it was safe to let this guy walk around with a sledge hammer?
The Stanford Tree (Stanford University)
Really, "tree" is an awfully generous description for this thing, which was inspired by a nearby redwood tree called El Palo Alto. Stanford's band came up with the nickname during a rebrand in the 1970s and is responsible for designing a new costume each year — to increasingly avant-garde results.
Big Red (Western Kentucky)
Big Red ... what, exactly? There's something vaguely ominous about the amorphous blob which represents the Western Kentucky Hilltoppers, although maybe it's just that he's been known to swallow people whole at random. Big Red was the brainchild of a WKU student in the 1970s, who wanted to come up with something that both captured the spirit of the school while steering clear of popular stereotypes about Kentucky. Mission accomplished, I guess.
The Mountaineer (West Virginia University)
They don't call West Virginia the Mountain State for nothing, so it's only fitting that the school's mascot is the mountaineer. And because this is college football we're talking about, of course there's a literal mountaineer who roams the sidelines at football games with a buckskin get-up and a musket rifle. The school has been tapping students to serve as The Mountaineer since the 1920s, and we sincerely hope they never stop.
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