Earlier this week, a poll from the Chicago Tribune started circulating around the interwebs asked fans who they think the best mascot is in the Big Ten, including our new awkward adopted step-children Maryland and Rutgers. Of course, the poll already made a giant error: they listed Purdue Pete as our mascot.
Purdue Pete is awesome, but he is not our mascot, Chicago! It's the Boilermaker Special! And Purdue Pete will drive our train over the other stuffed animals you call mascots (and that annoying midget in South Bend too)!
Anywho, when I first looked at the poll yesterday morning, the nut head from Ohio State had most of the votes, with Purdue Pete sitting towards the bottom.
Meh, typical, I expected that, time to move on.
But then when I looked at the poll last night, Purdue had jumped up with nearly 70% of the votes. SHOCKING. I knew that the main Purdue social media pages were sharing the link, but I didn't think this was possible. Then I saw that nearly 900,000 people voted for Pete. And at 10:30 this morning, 2.5 MILLION people voted for Purdue Pete.
THIS IS TOTALLY LEGIT, GUYS. NO ONE WROTE COMPUTER CODE(S) TO MAKE SURE PURDUE PETE WOULD HAVE THAT MANY VOTES. WHY WOULDN'T 2.5 MILLION PEOPLE, OR BASICALLY MOST OF CHICAGO, VOTE FOR PURDUE PETE?! HE IS TOTALLY AWESOME AND WILL HAUNT YOUR DREAMS IF YOU DON'T VOTE FOR HIM.
SHUN THE NON-BELIEVERS. SHUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN.
Also, Maryland's Testudo and Rutgers' Scarlet Knight only have 534 and 289 votes, respectively. HAHAHA.
UPDATE: From Chicago Tribune's Senior Digital News Editor:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>Big 10 best mascot poll: 3,571,153 votes on 159,000 page views. No script hacks there <a href="http://t.co/ILcyJnJuMS">http://t.co/ILcyJnJuMS</a></p>— Kurt Gessler (@kurtgessler) <a href="https://twitter.com/kurtgessler/statuses/494476533210558464">July 30, 2014</a></blockquote>
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