It's the question that's on everyone's mind these days.
I joke, but this is something I've wondered about for a while, in large part because my home state of Illinois has some tremendously odd team names: the Hoopeston Cornjerkers, the Centralia Orphans, the Teutopolis Wooden Shoes, the Polo Marcos. My high school was the Spartans (the 18th most common team name), but the surrounding schools' mascots were plenty strange: the Barbs, the Hubs, the Cogs, the Whip-Purs, the Pretzels.
To see whether Illinois is, in fact, the land of unique mascots, I scraped MascotDB to get the team names of just over 22,000 active high schools in the U.S. We'll skip the methodology for now to bring you your feature presentation, each state + D.C. ranked by high school mascot uniqueness:
I'm not sure what to make of this, exactly, other than to say that small states generally have weirder team names, and Southern states generally have more common ones.
Illinois at a paltry 18th is a bummer, but congrats to Vermont and their Burlington Seahorses, their Bellows Free Bobwhites (named after a real guy named Bob White), and their Randolph Galloping Ghosts (a mural in their gymnasium reads 'We Believe In Ghosts.' You have to love it.).
If any readers are thinking of starting a high school, I implore you to make the team name bizarre. This world doesn't need more Wildcats-- it needs more Alices and Awesome Blossoms.
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Methodology:
For every team name in the country, I counted how many schools have that name. For example, there are 318 active high schools with Spartans as a mascot. So every 'Spartans' team gets a score of 318. If, as in the case of the aforementioned Barbs, only one school has that name, that team gets a score of 1.
I then looked at the average school score in every state, so if a state has two schools, the Spartans and the Barbs, its score would be (318+1)/2 = 159.5. The scores run higher than you might think because the team names with the highest scores (like, say, the Eagles, who score a 1304) are by definition overrepresented (that's where the score comes from), so the average is dragged way up. Needless to say, this whole measurement is only as good as MascotDB's data, but it's the best we can do.
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