Not all Wildcats are equal, as Fox Sports found out Thursday. For understandable reasons, Fox was promoting their Week 0 Big Noon Saturday (actually, a 12:30 p.m. ET start in this case) game, featuring the Nebraska Cornhuskers against the Northwestern Wildcats in Dublin, Ireland. That’s the only Power Five on Power Five game of Week 0, and it’s going to get a lot of attention. And the FoxSports.com article on this from RJ Young was generally fine. But it came with a highly unfortunate custom graphic that somehow subbed in the Kansas State Wildcats’ mascot for the Northwestern mascot:
FOX…come on. This is ROUGH.https://t.co/dNcLx3vxbw
— West Lot Pirates (@westlotpirates) August 25, 2022
Maxwell Smart has an appropriate comment for Fox here:
Look, yes, both schools go by “Wildcats,” and both mascots are named “Willie,” and they both wear white and purple. But Kansas State’s Willie The Wildcat is rather different than Northwestern’s Willie The Wildcat. And it’s very obvious that that’s a Kansas State mascot from the Big XII logo on the top left of the uniform. But four hours after this was initially pointed out, that graphic was still live on Fox’s site. And their graphic usage here drew a lot of comment:
Kansas State, Ireland's team. https://t.co/ytCsAPWPeW
— Andrew Hammond (@ahammALDC) August 25, 2022
Someone googled Willie the Wildcat…and doesn’t have a clue about college football. https://t.co/g2t6ZX9DvY
— Aaron Morse (@MorseCode206) August 25, 2022
It's Nebraska vs Northwestern with a special appearance by the Kansas State Mascot for some reason in Ireland on @FoxSports!!! pic.twitter.com/aIOLCZ89Fe
— 🇸🇨 Sickos Committee 🇸🇨 (@SickosCommittee) August 25, 2022
@TomFornelli Fox has already forgotten who Northwestern is. So this should make them a easy shoe in for Big West champ now. pic.twitter.com/Tj3iXDrISl
— Jay Haskovec (@jayhutch40) August 25, 2022
Fox really paid to fly K-State’s Willie the Wildcat mascot to Ireland instead of Northwestern’s pic.twitter.com/9nw6AM85Hp
— Tyler Palmateer (@Tpalmateer83) August 25, 2022
Photo mixups happen, and it makes sense that one mascot might be confused for another with the same name, but the conference affiliation on the uniform really should have been the key tipoff here. Big Ten expansion hasn’t yet led to the addition of Kansas State, which you’d think the conference’s primary rightsholder would know. So that meant that Fox’s graphic for this story wound up drawing a lot of mockery.
