Anybody notice how disinterested the University of Georgia’s mascot appeared during Monday night’s national championship football game? Georgia and Alabama were going at each other hammer and tongs, with 67,000 spectators shaking the rafters and the game’s caffeinated commentators at full volume.

But a quick TV shot of Uga, the bulldog who represents Georgia’s athletic teams, revealed one spectator who wasn’t even pretending to care about developments on the field. Looking half-asleep, grumpy, wish I-were-somewhere-sniffing-fire-hydrants, Uga’s demeanor convinced me that real-life mascots aren’t the answer.

A mascot should embrace its cartoon aspect. It should be a little silly and certainly lively—a bit of dancing, some gymnastics, a few eye-catching stunts, possibly a feigned duel with the opposing team’s mascot. (To a point, anyway. I once covered a Georgia Tech-Maryland basketball game that featured what was dangerously close to a real fight between two students dressed as the Tech yellow jacket and Maryland turtle during a timeout. Could have called a technical foul on those people inside the wacky critter suits.)

Anyway, it turns out that there is a Mascot Hall of Fame (founded in 2005 and based just outside Chicago) and, among the 25 inductees, not one is live—though Blue, Butler University’s bulldog, was a finalist in last year’s voting. There are indeed a few interesting live mascots extant in college sports—among them, Ralphie, the University of Colorado buffalo, and Bevo, the University of Texas longhorn steer.

But the argument here is that those live beasts are not willing participants in the proceedings. Georgia’s Uga is a perfect example, thoroughly out of his element on a football sideline, requiring an air-conditioned dog house and the presence of bags of ice at home games because bulldogs are susceptible to heat stroke in the humid conditions of the Southeast. The Arkansas Razorback, Tusk, obviously wouldn’t know a fumble from an audible—and, furthermore, Tusk isn’t even a razorback, since those exist only in Australia. He’s a Russian boar (sort of in a razorback costume).

So why not leave the work to humans operating inside goofy outfits of anthropomorphically depicted wildcats and ducks and shocks of wheat? Such a tradition is how this topic showed up on my radar shortly before the Georgia-Alabama game.

There was an obituary about a New York Mets’ former ticket-office employee named Dan Reilly, whose place in mascot history came 58 years ago when he slipped into an unventilated, oversize papier-mache head with simulated stitches—to resemble a baseball—and became the original Mr. Met mascot.

Mr. Met was inducted into the Mascot Hall of Fame in 2007, described as “a humanoid with a baseball head.” He—Mr. Met, not Dan Reilly—thus is immortalized alongside, among others, the Hall’s first member, the Phillie Phanatic—whose human inside-job man, David Raymond, happens to be the founder of the Mascot Hall of Fame.

The Hall, which bills itself as essentially a children’s museum, describes its mission as “celebrating the unsung heroes of sports and communities.” Something we grown-ups can appreciate as well.

Of course the 1970s madcap San Diego Chicken—later recast as The Famous Chicken—is in the Hall, recognized by the New York Times as “perhaps the most influential mascot in sports history.” The Chicken pioneered the widespread creation of mascots in professional sports, though colleges have been cranking out less sophisticated ones for decades.

In my half-century as a sports journalist, I naturally have crossed paths with mascots tied to high schools, colleges, pros and Olympic sports, including one favorite at the former grass-roots domestic competition known as the U.S. Olympic Festival. That was in 1989 in Oklahoma City, when a lad named Ken Evans dressed himself in a furry critter suit and wandered among the 38 sports being contested over two weeks.

He found that “the big question” among Festival attendees “was, ‘What am I?’ Am I a bear or a gopher or what?’” He was a prairie dog, christened Boomer. And my recollection is that he lamented there being neither ventilation nor some sort of fan inside the big prairie-dog head, which became an enormous problem when he got sick to his stomach in the Oklahoma heat.

But, see: Even the people in the cheap seats could tell that was a mascot fully involved in the moment. One who knew the score.