Oklahoma basketball: Top Daug’s re-entry draws capacity crowd to LNC
By Chip Rouse
With longtime Big 12 powerhouse and top-10-ranked Kansas coming to town, the Oklahoma basketball crowd at Lloyd Noble Center on Tuesday was expected to be a little larger than normal.
That was a logical assumption, given that OU-Kansas game historically have attracted good crowds, except on this particular night, it wasn’t Kansas that brought the fans out as much as it was the return of “Top Daug” as the Oklahoma basketball mascot.
School officials reported that attendance for Tuesday’s game was 10,486, the largest of the season and the second best home crowd in two seasons at an OU basketball game. Before Tuesday night, the Sooners had averaged right around 6,800 at the six Oklahoma men’s home games this season.
The fans showed up early on Tuesday and were in their seats when Top Daug came bounding out of a smoke-filled tunnel and circled the court to the delight of the crowd, while music from the song “Who Let the Dogs Out” played in the background.
Top Daug was the ever-popular Sooner basketball mascot in the 1980s and ’90s. Introduced during the Billy Tubbs coaching era at Oklahoma, a time when the Sooners were as successful, if not more so, than the OU football program. OU basketball crowds were much larger and more engaged then than they are today, and Top Daug had a lot to do with it.
Tubbs had a lot to do with the creation of the Top Daug mascot. As the story goes, when Tubbs took over as head coach of the Sooner basketball program in 1980, the OU wrestling program was having a lot of success and attracting good crowds that brought a lot of energy and fan support to the matches. The wrestling program had a mascot that it called “Underdog.”
Tubbs liked the idea of having a special mascot, but he didn’t like the name Underdog. He didn’t want fans to think of OU as underdogs. As the men’s basketball team built national recognition under Tubbs, a basketball mascot was created to match Underdog. The decision was made to name the new mascot Top Daug.
Top Daug quickly became a fan favorite. The mascot not only spanned the Sooners’ glory seasons under Tubbs, but also carried over into most all of Kelvin Sampson’s time at Oklahoma.
Top Daug was officially retired after the 2004-05 season. After an absence of 15-plus years, the popular mascot reappeared during the Oklahoma-Kansas basketball game and is expected to again become a permanent fixture within both the Sooner men’s and women’s basketball programs.
OU officials are hoping that bringing Top Daug out of retirement will help increase fan engagement and excitement for the Oklahoma basketball teams.
"“It’s great. People have great memories of Top Daug and good memories from that era with Coach Tubbs and all the great things he was doing with the program at that time,” head men’s coach Lon Kruger told The Oklahoman newspaper this week."
The OU coach should know. He was the coach at Kansas State in the mid-to-late 1980s and remembers Top Daug well from the Wildcat’s trips to Norman.