Welcome to The Holy Land of Hoops

The surprise to me was finding out about the dalmatians; the only mascot I associate with PC is their current one. The bulldog mascots for Butler and Georgetown are pretty adorable.

My wife is seriously creeped out by the Friar.

I had no idea the mascot used to be a Dalmatian though. I was rather confused last weekend during the 80's-90's dance commercials seeing one dancing with the Providence team.

the mascot has always been the friar. PC had a real dog for a few years but he wasn't the official mascot. the dalmation around today is secondary or maybe assistant might be better term

We had a succession of real Dalmatians like Butler or UGA has had bulldogs. But in the late 70s we introduced a big headed papier mache bald friar with rosy cheeks who looked like he was drinking too much of the sacrificial wine and got too cozy with altar boys. Then we went to the man-in-a-dalmation suit who looked like a spotted snoopy. I liked him. There was a legend (probably apocryphal) that Saint Dominic (PC is a Dominican order school) had visions of God visiting him in the form of a Dalmatian or something like that - a sort of reverse son of Sam story), so we adopted the dalmation as our mascot. Personally, I think the real story is that one of the brothers who lived in campus owned a dalmation and he named it Friar Boy and he'd walk around campus. Plus he was black and white, so the school colors. Then they got this awful guy in a friar suit who looked like a meth-head version of Jay Leno, and that didn't take so they took this creepy one instead. I used to hate him. Now, we are always voted ugliest or creepiest mascot in college hoops and we get snarky (but entertaining articles) in Deadpsin about us, so now we've embraced the "it's so bad it's good" mentality. Like Oscar Wilde said and Donald Trump lives, any publicity is good - it doesn't matter if its negative or positive. The problem is he is so scary that little kids would recoil. Not a great way to build future fanbase, so the re-introduced the Dalmatian, so we have two mascots now. A warm cuddly dog and the creepy Friar. I am fine with that, and sort of own the awfulness of the Friar. The worst of all is that the Dominican monks were known as blackfriars (like the bridge in London) for the black cowels they wore, but our mascot has always had a white cowel. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.