One of the other advantages of the Butler basketball media machine? Billions of stories about Blue II, Butler’s English bulldog mascot!

Everyone loves Blue.

Since the Final Four and Championship games were in Indianapolis last year (and here I would link to my old blog posts about last year’s championship festivities if the new technology hadn’t eaten my archives…. grrrr…), I saw Blue much more often. Since Blue was in Houston this year, and I was not? No Blue sightings. Well, unless you count the photos someone stuck in the skywalk between Jordan and Gallahue hall:

Houston, we don't have a problem.

Still, I like the real Blue better.

Blue is quite the popular bulldog. If you don’t follow his Twitter, you are missing out on some cute pictures. For a while, my mother changed the desktop picture on the family computer whenever Blue’s owners posted a new picture. The desktop background changed at least once a day.

Blue’s travels to Houston created a whole new host of photo ops. I particularly enjoyed the airport sequence:

(These are not my photos, obviously. Blue has his own Flickr photostream.)

Seriously, though. Talk about celebrity. This dog also has a Facebook page, blog, Youtube channel, and even a live webcam! And more fans than Justin Bieber. [I originally misspelled that as "Beiber" and had to check to see which was correct. Don't worry. I'm still sane.]