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Dec 27, 2025 By Ben Moyer 5 min read

Ãå±±½ûµØ and the outdoors seldom overlap. That’s my opinion at least, based on my belief that hunting, fishing, hiking, and foraging are not sports. Instead, these are meaningful lifestyle choices that immerse the participant in the natural world and have no identifiable beginning or inventor in humanity’s distant past. These pursuits have existed as long as we humans have. Ãå±±½ûµØ, on the other hand, were invented recently by someone and are competitive. Big difference.

But this weekend, Saturday, Dec. 27, sports and outdoors/nature do overlap, in a way, especially in this region.

On Saturday, Dec. 27, Pitt’s football team plays East Carolina in the Go Bowling Military Bowl, and Penn State confronts Clemson in the Pinstripe Bowl.

Where’s the overlap with outdoors?

The answer is something I’ve never heard discussed by sports commentators, and it may be something that both institutions, because of their historic shared animosity, are reluctant to acknowledge.

Both schools, Pitt and Penn State, chose the same mascot to represent their teams. They just use different names for the creature.

Pitt calls their mascot “Panther,” while Penn State dubs theirs “Lion,” as in Nittany Lion, named for Mount Nittany, a prominent mountain ridge just south of State College.

Clemson’s tiger mascot depicts the entirely different striped big cat native to Asia, the same icon chosen by the NFL’s Cincinnati Bengals.

But getting back to western/central Pennsylvania, panther and lion are simply two of the many names applied to the one large predatory cat (Puma concolor) that prowled across the entire Western Hemisphere prior to European settlement.

Other names for the same cat, some familiar and some not so much include cougar, puma, mountain lion, catamount, wildcat, and painter. Folks in some remote Appalachian regions even referred to this big cat as “mountain screamer.” Although it’s tough to document, this animal is believed to have more common names than any wild creature in the world, at least 40 in English alone, and likely many more in Spanish and Portuguese.

The original range of the mountain lion/panther/cougar/puma spanned North America from coast to coast and reached from central Canada to Cape Horn including the entire South American continent.

The name Panther for this native American cat is linked to that time in history when the Appalachian Mountains were America’s western frontier, hence its appropriate selection by both Penn State and the University of Pittsburgh.

Settlement, agriculture, and urbanization wiped this cat out across most of eastern North America by the late 19th century, but it remains abundant in the Rocky Mountains, the desert Southwest, and throughout South America. An isolated population known as the Florida Panther clings to existence (100-300 individuals) in southern Florida.

But reports of this animal in the central and eastern United States are increasing. Wildlife officials have confirmed the presence of at least transient individuals in Indiana, Arkansas, and Michigan in recent years. And in 2011 a mountain lion with confirmed DNA originating in South Dakota was killed by a car in Connecticut.

Some biologists believe that with forest returning to large areas of abandoned cropland in the East, and with growing deer herds as prey, it is possible for a secretive nocturnal creature like the panther/mountain lion to probe eastward from western strongholds and recolonize forested landscapes in places like West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Despite reported sightings, however, Pennsylvania Game Commission officials have never acknowledged the presence of surviving or returning wild lions/panthers in the state. Here they’re officially extinct.

Conflicting with that official stance, though, are sightings that are hard to dismiss. I know a man of long and diverse outdoor experience. He lives in Uniontown and he’s neither braggart or windbag. He devoted decades to leading Boy Scouts in the woods, and he is one of the most accomplished fly-casters I’ve ever met. Several times, he’s told me about a large tawny cat with a long, thick, black-tipped tail — not a bobcat — he encountered while hunting deer in Cameron County, Pennsylvania. Coming from him, the account merits, at least, consideration.

It seems plausible that panthers/lions could return to a landscape like ours because they remain abundant around big cities of the West, including Los Angeles.

Anyone looking for signs of mountain lions/panthers in Pennsylvania may be misled by a goof committed by Penn State and its promoters for many years. Penn State long distributed a window decal of a blue-and-white paw-print to proclaim allegiance to PSU’s sports teams. But that widely displayed print was anatomically wrong. It showed five toes arrayed around the central pad, while the true prints of all cats, from housecats to Siberian tigers, and including the American panther/mountain lion, display only four toes. Finally, someone, perhaps from the biology faculty, pointed out the error and the mistake was corrected.

I suffer no remorse in recalling this biological blunder since Penn State voted to close Fayette and six other Commonwealth campuses while simultaneously committing almost $1 billion to luxury upgrades of its football stadium. Go Tigers.