College Football Mascot Rankings Snub All SEC Programs

Georgia's Hairy Dawg is a costumed mascot favorite... but not among On3's panel of top mascot pickers. Dale Zanine-Imagn Images

College Football Mascot Rankings Snub All SEC Programs

Originally posted on CFB-HQ on SI | By Joe Cox | Last updated May 4, 2026 10:04 AM ET

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It's already been a tough college football run for the SEC. After watching the Big Ten claim the last three College Football Playoffs, the SEC might even be slipping in the world of mascots. In a recent ranking of top college football costumed mascots, the SEC came up missing-- completely missing.

SEC Mascot Shutout

A panel of pickers from On3 recent pondered the mascot world and set a pair of important ground rules-- no human mascots could be considered (which would knock out, say, Tennessee's Davy Crockett mascot) and neither would live animals (thus omitting Georgia's series of UGA live bulldogs). But even with those limitations, the SEC's disappearance from the top of the mascot game was more than a bit surprising.

Top Mascot Picks

The three-man panel from On3 didn't pick any SEC mascots in their top five picks. The three top picks chosen were Western Kentucky's Big Red, Oregon's Duck, and Sparty of Michigan State. It's an interesting group. The least familiar for many is Big Red, who resembles McDonald's purple Grimace mascot, albeit in red form. Big Red starred in a SportsCenter add years ago in which it stood outside a pair of gendered restrooms, apparently uncertain which is appropriate for a gender-amorphous blobby mascot.

The SEC's Honorable Mention

The group did name Florida's Albert and Alberta Gator as honorable mention picks, but then also clarified that no SEC mascots made the list. On3's story specifically notes that the SEC had many impressive live-animal mascots, but no costumed SEC mascots earned top honors.

Bob Kupbens-Imagn Images

That's an interesting conclusion as many of the SEC's top costumed mascots are essentially doubles of their live-animal counterparts. For instance, Tennessee will have a live Smokey dog as a mascot, but also has the cartoonish, costumed Smokey on the sidelines. Likewise for Georgia, with UGA as the live dog and Hairy Dawg as his softer, gentler, costumed form.

In fact, every SEC school seems to have a costumed mascot. Some are a little less exotic than others, like Vanderbilt's Mr. Commodore, who is apparently modeled off of Cornelius Vanderbilt himself. Certainly an old man with side chops is a little less inventive than Big Red or Sparty.

Some of the Surprising Omissions

But some of the SEC's costumed mascots like South Carolina's Cocky and Auburn's Aubie the Tiger are often cited as some of the most popular mascots in the nation. The Universal Cheerleaders Association made Cocky the national mascot of the year twice, for instance. But at least one group of mascot-rankers left the SEC out in the cold.