If you’re not familiar with the Oregon Ducks and their fans, you will be after watching this.
Earlier this week, a brilliant group of Oregon students created a video called “I Love My Ducks,” in which they proclaim their love for the Oregon Ducks football team. (Watch the video here; I’m working on embedding it into the post, but there seem to be some problems with Yahoo! Videos on WordPress blogs.)
“I smell roses,” they say, referring to the Ducks’ chances of making it to the Rose Bowl.
Things are not so rosy, however, when it comes to dealing with the Oregon Athletic Department.
The video features our school’s mascot, Puddles the Duck. Puddles is licensed by Disney, and while I’ll admit that I don’t know every detail of the copyright restrictions, the AD pulled the video from YouTube because they were afraid of a call from Disney. They were worried that Disney would be upset that this unassuming group of students would get them in trouble, simply for using the Duck in the video.
What better publicity for your school than to have three typical college guys creating original raps about their intense love of the team. They’re showing off the Oregon logo throughout the video, they’re in front of Autzen Stadium…basically everything about this video screams free publicity.
But all because of Puddles, this video is deemed unworthy by the Athletic Department. It’s too bad they’re keeping the video from attracting fans to their games, bringing traffic to their website and putting more money in their wallets.
Here’s how you can spread the word about this great video:
• Post the video on your Facebook page.
• Tweet the link. (Even better, tell ESPN College GameDay to play the video on Saturday, when they feature the Oregon v. Arizona game.)
• Comment on blogs that posted about the video, like Deadspin, The UO Sports Dude, Communication Rhodes, and this blog.
• Become a fan of Supwitchugirl on Facebook; that’s the group that created the video.
Feel free to comment on this post if you love the Ducks and/or this video and if you know of another way to efficiently spread the word about it.