First, I just rediscovered this gem of an animated GIF from September and had to bring it back:

(From RjTheMetalhead, purveyor of fine single and multi-frame images.) Anyway, hoping to see a lot of that this weekend.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about Uga. No, not the school, the dog. New breed standards were recently developed for the English bulldog, and Uga’s breeders aren’t happy about that:

“I don’t care what the British do,” said Sonny Seiler, owner of the bulldog line that has become the most celebrated sports mascot in the United States.
Critics in England and in the United States, however, said breeders have transformed bulldogs and some other dog breeds into genetic monstrosities prone to chronic disease and sometimes early death.

 This what the original bulldog mascot, Yale’s Handsome Dan, looked like in 1890:

The underbite is there, but notice the overall lack of wrinkles and muscular frame. I’d paste an actual Uga here, but you’ve probably seen them before and if you haven’t: remember that the past few Ugas were not terribly mobile and generally spent most of their times at the game laying on a block of ice due to respiratory issues. There’s also been the notable short lifespan of the previous two. The current Uga, of course, isn’t actually an Uga because he’s not nearly in-bred enough and actually has a brown spot (because Ugas also have to have a perfectly white coat). Even by today’s degraded standards, other Bulldog mascots (think Miss State and the current stand-in for UGA) look relative healthy compared to the last few Ugas.

I swear, these “inbred redneck” jokes just about write themselves.