[image-1]An Arkansas State University study committee recommended today that the school retire the Indian mascot. The committee was formed amid controversy prompted by an NCAA rule to ban use of Native American team names in NCAA championship events. ASU has been one of the last holdouts, but losing contests elsewhere had begun to make the decision all but inevitable.

Jim Pickens, who chaired the 35-member committee, said the decision wasn’t easy but the resolution was approved unanimously by the 33 in attendance. The next step will be a recommendation on implementation of the change that could be approved by the ASU Board of Trustees as early as August. This means, most likely, that plans for the change would be undertaken during the next school year, to be implemented in 2008-09. Pickens said it was hoped that the NCAA would acknowledge ASU’s decision to change and not penalize Indian athletic teams in 2007-08 should they qualify for tournaments in which the rule now applies.

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Pickens said a national sports marketing firm would be engaged to plan for the change in “branding” and the name selection process would have broad participation. He said the transition would include an “appropriate and sensitive retirement” of the old mascot. In the long run, he said, he hoped it “could be an adversity turned into an opportunity.”

Pickens said he had no personal choice for a new mascot. I’m still kind of partial to one of ASU’s earliest mascots, the gorilla.

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