The Stanford Cardinal makes sense because the school colors are Cardinal & White... except USC's colors are Cardinal and Gold and the two school's colors are very different shades of red. Stanford's cardinal is very close to a primary red, much like the bird. USC's cardinal is a deeply saturated purpleish-red, much like the robes worn by the old single dudes in Rome.
You forgot to mention the University of Irvine Anteaters. They were like, some of the weird mascots you mentioned, chosen in a poll where the students voted for a joke candidate.
I went to grad school at USC, which has an odd mascot, the Trojan. It was not named after the condom... they got the name because Cecil B. DeMille recruited the band to play a marching band in an epic about the Trojan wars, and they kept the uniforms afterwards. (It was a silent movie, ironically.) The nickname previously was the Wesleyans.
I did my undergrad at Columbia who have a fairly generic nickname the Lions. It doesn't fit the name of the school, which is the Latin word for "pigeon." But it does fit the original name of the school, Kings College. The pigeon would have been a better mascot, I think: it even fits the school colors, which are a greyish blue and white, much the same colors as a typical pigeon.
I went to grad school at USC, which has an odd mascot, the Trojan. It was not named after the condom... they got the name because Cecil B. DeMille recruited the band to play a marching band in an epic about the Trojan wars, and they kept the uniforms afterwards. (It was a silent movie, ironically.) The nickname previously was the Wesleyans.
I did my undergrad at Columbia who have a fairly generic nickname the Lions. It doesn't fit the name of the school, which is the Latin word for "pigeon." But it does fit the original name of the school, Kings College. The pigeon would have been a better mascot, I think: it even fits the school colors, which are a greyish blue and white, much the same colors as a typical pigeon.