Changing times

Ole Miss benches Colonel Rebel as it rethinks mascot

OXFORD, Miss. (AP) -- The Colonel Rebel mascot is out for this football season while the University of Mississippi searches for a new image.

Athletic Director Pete Boone said the "Southern plantation-look" man with a big head, floppy hat and clothes and cane will be off the sidelines while Ole Miss considers what it will do about its mascot.

The Colonel Rebel logo, however, is still an official trademark of the university, university officials said Wednesday.

In recent years, Mississippi has been steering its image away from the Old South by fazing out symbols that some say are racially divisive. Confederate battle flags, once pervasive at football games, have been banished and "Dixie" has been dropped as the school's unofficial fight song.

Boone said there are no plans to change the school's longtime nicknames "Ole Miss" or "Rebels."

School officials have been toying with the idea of revamping Colonel Rebel for about eight years, Boone said.

"The thing that has always struck me about our mascot is that it was not an athletic mascot," he told the Oxford Eagle newspaper. "It was, as we've all said, an old man with a cane. It just didn't look athletic, it didn't represent anything athletic and it seemed to be a different image than what we were trying to do from an athletic department standpoint."

The private Ole Miss Loyalty Foundation that supports athletics has spent $30,000 for the New York-based Phoenix Design Works to study Colonel Rebel, Ole Miss lettering and logos.

The university may ask for suggestions in a design contest that opens it up to students, alumni and other supporters during the 2003-04 school year.

The study and search are underway, but school officials have said it's highly unlikely a replacement will be found, or finalized, before basketball season or possibly next year. Officials said the school will not have a mascot until a suitable replacement is approved.

 

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