It’s that special time of the year again – intramural flag football is here. Sweat, blood and the occasional tear will be shed over the next two months on the Maple-Willow-Larch intramural fields, but win or lose, there’s always a cool team name to fall back on.

This year, the Daily has picked three of the best names and gotten the lowdown on how they came to be.

London Silly Nannies:

Although their first preliminary game was lost 46-8, at least the team can say its name made the newspaper.

The London Silly Nannies is headed up by Alexandre Jensen, junior in construction engineering, who claims the rights to team captain. Jensen said the name originated from the TV show “Family Guy.”

“We got our name off an episode of ‘Family Guy,'” Jensen said. “When I was signing up our team I asked our players what our name should be and we came up with London Silly Nannies.”

The team thought it was a winner so they decided to go with it, a good call, by our standards.

“We thought it clever and humorous, so we stuck with it,” Jensen said.

In the show “Family Guy,” the London Silly Nannies refers to a fictional football team based out of London that Peter Griffin is sent to after his excessive showboating while playing for the New England Patriots.

Crazy, sure, but the episode is titled “Patriot Games,” if you want to check it out.Muskoxen:

Currently competing in the men’s intramural B/C division is team Muskoxen.

Team unity is what gets these oxen moving, and they moved right to the top of their bracket with a 23-0 victory in their first preliminary game.

“Similar to the ‘Flying V’ from ‘The Mighty Ducks,’ when musk oxen are threatened, they form a circle with their heads pointing out and will defend their young in the middle of the circle,” said Mark Kline, team captain and junior in biology. “Like the musk oxen, when we have a football game our team comes together and we are much fiercer together than we would be alone.”

Last year the team called themselves “The Flying Squirrels,” and they wanted to keep the animal theme running.

“We were struggling to come up with a good animal so it was suggested that we use Google,” Kline said. “We typed in ‘weird animals’ and the musk oxen was one of the first to come up.”

Kline said Cy may be in trouble if the Muskoxen ever appeared in Ames.

“I think the Muskoxen would give Cy a run for the world’s greatest mascot,” Kline said.

Gubernaculums:

“A part or organ that directs the movement or course of another part,” is the www.dictionary.com definition of gubernaculums.

Jacci Hermansen, sophomore in veterinary medicine and team captain of the Gubernaculums, has a different definition.

“The Gubernaculum aids in the descent of the testis during development,” Hermansen said.

Hermansen uses metaphors to describe her team’s reasoning for choosing the abstract name.

“We decided on the name while studying in the library at vet school,” Hermansen said. “Several of us were discussing names and decided that a gubernaculum aids in the descent of immature ‘nuts’ in the same way that us girls help young boys find their way.”

The women said the team name exists to exemplify where they currently are at in their existence.

“We weren’t necessarily trying to convey a message by using this name,” Hermansen said. “We were simply using a term that expresses the place we are at in our lives and has some fun in it, too.”

The team seems to be having fun on and off the field – they won their first preliminary game, 36-0.