How the peacock became an alternate mascot of Auburn basketball in 2022

Auburn’s official mascot is the Tigers, but enter its basketball arena on game day and you’ll find plenty of peacocks. The colorful bird has become something of an unofficial mascot for the team this season, a recent article from AL.com explained.

The movement began with a couple of Auburn fans on a podcast. Ryan Sterritt and Drew Crowson co-host “Orange and True,” which is featured on the SB Nation blog College and Magnolia. They applied the term to the Tigers basketball team during their first episode of the new year.

At that time Auburn basketball was still rising, up to No. 9 in the AP poll after beginning the season No. 22. But many fans, including Sterritt, were hesitant to put their complete faith in the team. They had grown used to watching Auburn fail to live up to expectations and didn’t want to be disappointed yet again.

Crowson wasn’t having it. The Auburn graduate boldly declared fans needed to puff their chests and exude more confidence, much like a peacock would.

“A lot of Auburn fans kind of have this complex like Lucy’s going to pull the football out from Charlie Brown at some point,” Crowson told AL.com. “…Instead, Auburn fans need to walk around like peacocks; we just need to be peacocking this season…. It’s the attitude of a fan of a great team having that expectation of wins and knowing that it’s fun when you win, and it’s fun to act like we’re going to win. Even if we do lose, I would rather have been positive about the experience than win and have spent that entire season expecting Lucy to pull the football.”

Ahead a Jan. 11 matchup against Alabama, Crowson wrote a story for College and Magnolia simply titled “PEACOCK”. He couldn’t have imagined in that moment how quickly it would catch on. Students began bringing peacock cutouts to games, with one even creating a peacock sock puppet seen at a game against Oklahoma.

The school got in on the fun as well. The official Auburn basketball Twitter account now features a peacock in its name. On Feb. 1, the team featured a peacock-themed graphic during the under-4 timeout in the first half. It included a soundbite of Mark Wahlberg’s character from the 2010 movie “The Other Guys” shouting, “I’m a peacock! You gotta let me fly!”

The Auburn basketball team has rewarded that confidence with unprecedented success this season. It reached the first-ever No. 1 ranking in program history, going on a 19-game winning streak from Nov. 25 to Feb. 5. Although Arkansas eventually snapped that streak last week in overtime, it hasn’t broken fans’ confidence. At this point, it’s clear Auburn has one of the best teams in all of college hoops.

Bruce Pearl already made program history once, leading Auburn to its first Final Four in 2019. With the way he has the team playing this season, there’s good reason to believe they could go even farther. But regardless of the outcome, Stower is just happy he was able to bring confidence back to the fans — and even the players.

“I guess the message is we’re not afraid to think that we’re good,” Auburn center Walker Kessler said. “I don’t think we are afraid; I think we’re confident. I think there’s a fine line between arrogance and confidence. It’s good to be confident, probably not the best to be arrogant, but I feel like as a team we always go into a game excited, no matter who we’re playing. We do a good job of never underestimating our opponent, so I feel like as long as we keep that mentality, I don’t care if they make a polar bear shirt.”