Pudge, Bowling Green’s unlikely new football mascot, is attracting a legion of fans

Bowling Green, Ohio — To show power and dominance, a lot of colleges use real animals as mascots to fire up the crowd at football games.

Bowling Green State University in Ohio is no exception, only their warrior guide is more Fancy Feast than terrible beast.

Pudge, Bowling Green’s 3-year-old Persian cat, attends every home game. His mere presence is like catnip for their dogged fans. Bowling Green’s football players say Pudge has become a phenomenon.

“There’s thousands of people there just to see a cat,” one player told CBS News.

Pudge is owned by George Carlson, who also happens to be the team’s long snapper.

“People love him, and I guess I can’t blame them, because I love him too,” Carlson told CBS News of Pudge.

Carlson first brought Pudge to the locker room earlier this season. At the time, he says the team’s morale was low because it had been hit by the injury bug, and so he thought what they needed was a cat.

Carlson had seen Pudge work miracles before, in his own life.

“I mean for me, he played a really big role,” Carlson said.

Last year, Carlson lost his mother, Cristen, to ovarian cancer.

“It was very tough for me — especially living in a single apartment,” Carlson said. “I could get really down. You’d spiral really easily. But the thing is, I could come home to this cat, whose just funny looking, he’s slightly odd… It helped a lot. I just think the whole process would have been harder without him.”

And it was that belief, in the healing power of the purr, that brought Pudge to the team and now to his legion of fans.

Home game attendance is up almost 60% this year, according to the school — the largest increase for any NCAA Division I football team in the country.

It’s no doubt due, in part, to the long snapper, and the long napper, who have given everyone in this community reason to cheer.