The University of Pittsburgh has announced the six finalist names for its panther mascot in honor of National Mascot Day.

Voting is open to anyone who loves the 6-foot-plus plush black panther that usually appears Winnie-the-Pooh style (no bottoms).

The finalist names are

• Jett – sleek, speedy and black as night.
• Piper – a high-flying salute to the iconic Piper Cub planes that took off right where our campus now stands.
• Brad – short for Bradford, long on Panther pride.
• Kinzua – takes its name from the Seneca word meaning “plenty of fish.”
• Blaze – Burning with Pitt pride and Bradford spark
• Blizzard – Icy, intense and unstoppable

To vote, visit upb.pitt.edu/name-the-panther through midnight July 7. One vote per person.

The big cat’s cognomen will be announced as part of Alumni and Family Weekend at Pitt-Bradford.

The contest came about after a mascot gathering for all five Pitt campuses in support of Pitt Day of Giving. Every other campus’s athletic ambassador had a name, except for Pitt-Bradford’s panther, which was just The Panther. That felt a bit like telling the vet your cat’s name is “Kitty.”

While it’s never had a name, Pitt-Bradford’s mascot has always been a panther. When the Bradford campus was founded in 1963, it adopted the panther mascot of its sponsor campus. Pitt’s athletic teams had been called the Panthers since 1909, when students and alumni there selected the native predator of Western Pennsylvania. In Appalachia, Eastern cougars were called panthers. Besides, Pitt Panthers had a nice ring to it.

In the 1980s, Pitt-Bradford had a homemade costume of a cougar-inspired golden panther like that of Pittsburgh’s campus, but when the current professional costume was purchased by Pitt-Bradford, the panther went from gold to black, which was more widely thought to be the color of panthers, which are black jaguars not native to Pennsylvania.