Podcast Ranks Area Mascots, Crowns North's Northstars Best; South's Blackshirts 'Solid But Generic'

WAUKESHA — I did not expect to spend a Tuesday evening with a bowl of pretzels listening to two men in their thirties argue about mascots for 40 minutes, but that is exactly what happened, and I regret nothing.

"The Postgame Breakdown," a local sports podcast recorded out of what I am told is a converted garage somewhere off Sunset Drive, released an episode last week titled "Mascot Power Rankings: Waukesha County Edition." Hosts Chad Yentzen and Dale Oberbrunner spent the full runtime ranking every high school mascot in the area, and I am not exaggerating when I say it has been the most consequential piece of local sports commentary since the 2023 debate over whether the county fair grandstand announcer says "Waukesha" correctly.

The results: Waukesha North's Northstars took first place. Waukesha South's Blackshirts came in second. Waukesha West's Wolverines finished third, out of exactly three entries, which the hosts acknowledged but did not apologize for.

The case for the Northstars

Yentzen, who identified himself on the show only as "a guy who's been to maybe nine North football games total, lifetime," called the Northstars "timeless and forward-thinking," a phrase he repeated three separate times across the episode, once with his mouth audibly full of something crunchy.

"A star doesn't go out of style. Nobody's going to look back in 50 years and think, man, remember when stars were cool? It's a star. It's load-bearing."

— Chad Yentzen, co-host, "The Postgame Breakdown"

Oberbrunner, for his part, pushed back only mildly, noting that a star is "technically not an animal, a person, or a concept with any aggression to it," before ultimately agreeing to rank it first anyway because, in his words, the podcast runs on a 51-minute recording limit and they were already at minute 38.

Blackshirts: solid, if you've heard of a shirt before

South's Blackshirts fared well but were damned with faint praise. Oberbrunner called the mascot "intimidating but regionally overused," pointing out that at least four college and professional programs nationally use some version of "Blackshirts" as a defensive nickname, and that Waukesha South's version "doesn't really distinguish itself from, say, a generic black polo."

This is, respectfully, nonsense, and I called Gary Puchalski to tell him so. Puchalski, who sits on the city council and attended Waukesha South decades before either podcast host owned a microphone, said the Blackshirts name has "a toughness to it that a star or an animal doesn't carry," and that he'd "put a Blackshirt up against a Northstar in a fight, no contest, every time, star doesn't have arms."

Wolverines finish third, debate the wilderness of it all

Waukesha West's Wolverines took the podcast's third and final slot, with Yentzen offering the episode's most memorable line, delivered, according to Oberbrunner's own running commentary, "with way too much confidence for a guy who I don't think has ever seen a wolverine."

"A wolverine is a predator nobody in Wisconsin associates with Wisconsin wilderness. You know what we've got? Deer. Turkeys. A wolverine would get reported to the DNR within the hour."

— Chad Yentzen, co-host, "The Postgame Breakdown"

West superfan and self-described "mascot truther" Denise Allhoff, 44, took issue with this characterization in a comment under the episode that ran 212 words and ended with the sentence "a wolverine absolutely could live here if it wanted to, it's a CHOICE thing, not a wilderness thing." Allhoff has not listened to the full episode but has, by her own account, "skimmed the transcript twice."

My own ranking, for the record

I spent 30 years with the Waukesha Department of Public Works and have therefore earned the right to have opinions about things that are not my job, so here is mine: the Blackshirts win, the Northstars are a tasteful second, and the Wolverines finish third purely on the technicality that nobody in this county has ever actually seen one, including, apparently, the animal itself.

Yentzen and Oberbrunner have announced a follow-up episode ranking area mascots against mascots from Oconomowoc and Hartland, which I will also be listening to, pretzels in hand, because apparently this is my life now.