I Set Out to Find the College With the Best Name. Help Me Pick the Winner.

Slippery Rock U.

I guess you could say things took a turn when the mayor of Slippery Rock, Pa., got involved.

“We must win this,” he tweeted. “I don’t know why it’s important but it is.”

I understood what he meant. A few weeks ago, I decided to run a March Madness-style tournament to determine which college has the best name. I didn’t know why it was important, but it was.

So I borrowed a 2018 higher-education directory — a door-stopping volume with thousands of college names — from the copy desk, and started writing down the ones that jumped out.

Oxnard. Brazosport. Assumption. Defiance.

I picked almost 100, then narrowed it down to 64: enough to fill a bracket. Colleges usually win tournaments based on their success in the meritorious and occasionally sordid business of collegiate athletics. I hoped the Best College Names Tournament would be more pure, if a bit random.

Colleges get their names in different ways. Sometimes there’s an intentional branding effort going on (I’m looking at you, Wright Graduate University for the Realization of Human Potential), but more often they’re named after people, places, or tribes, and the quality that makes them jump out is an accident of history and language.

D’Youville, which to my ear sounded like the start of a question asked in a drawl, was named for a French-Canadian saint. Whatcom, which struck me as a telecommunications corporation with an identity crisis, is a derivation of a Native American word meaning “noisy water.”

Others I liked purely for their musical qualities. Tougaloo was a trill on a woodwind. Dordt was Batman slugging a bad guy in a 1950s comic.

Ah, Dordt. I liked it from the start, and even more so as the tournament went on. But we’ll come back to that.

I divided up the 64 qualifiers thematically. There was the Pantry Deathmatch Division (Rice, Curry, Berry, Citrus), the I Was Not Aware Of These Saints Division (St. Olaf, St. Norbert, St. Cloud, St. John Fisher), the Great Sweatshirt Division (Hickey, Holy Names, Isothermal, Defiance), the Generic Male Names Division (Gordon, Barry, Alfred, Bob Jones), and so on.

OK, but WHICH COLLEGE HAS THE BEST NAME??

Here are a tourney’s worth of finalists. Gonna be running head-to-head this month…

Follow if you want to help settle this important question. pic.twitter.com/y4yiQmSsMv

— Steve Kolowich (@stevekolowich) March 12, 2018

The first round would be run in four-way heats. Each winner would be determined by Twitter poll. The deciders would be whoever cared to pay attention — mostly friends and colleagues, at first. It took only a dozen or so votes for Slippery Rock University, named for the Pennsylvania town where it’s located, to slide past Leech Lake Tribal College. Dordt’s first-round win over Kaskaskia was a virtual tie, but Twitter’s polling app gave it to Dordt, and I didn’t ask questions.

By the time the field had narrowed to the “Tweet Sixteen,” a crowd had gathered. People at Dordt, a small, Christian college in Iowa, had taken notice. Erik Hoekstra, the president, started whipping votes. He called on “Defender Nation” (Dordt’s team name is the Defenders) to vote. More than 300 people did just that, and Dordt cruised past Tougaloo with 90 percent of the vote.

When the field narrowed to the “Eltweete Eight” — my wordplay was getting desperate at this point — another college realized it was on the brink of a championship. “Do your thing, Rock Nation,” wrote whoever manages Slippery Rock’s athletics Twitter account.

Suddenly the Best College Names Tournament was sports.

“Let’s get the voting going again,” wrote D’Youville’s physical-therapy account to the library, career-services, and athletics accounts. “We can take Slippery Rock.”

“Vote DYC!” tweeted the men’s basketball team.

Slippery Rock pulled ahead by a few dozen votes, then a few hundred.

“Scoreboard,” a Slippery Rock student taunted a D’Youville student.

And then Slippery Rock buried D’Youville and moved on to the Final Four.

The opponent? Dordt.

That’s when the mayor got involved.

“We must win this,” tweeted Jondavid Longo, just before midnight on the night before the contest. (He’s a Slippery Rock graduate who won the office last year as a Republican.) “I don’t know why it’s important but it is.”

Not to be outdone, Hoekstra, the Dordt president, went full Braveheart the next morning.

“There comes a time in every institution’s life for everyone to join ‘in camaraderie,’” tweeted the president. “Today is that day for Dordt College and Defender Nation.”

The polls opened.

“Vote Dork!” someone tweeted.

“Hey, we’ll take it!” replied Dordt.

Dordt shot out to an early lead, but by the end of morning rush hour, Slippery Rock had surged ahead by an 8-percentage-point margin. Things stayed close through lunchtime, with votes rolling in for both semifinalists: 500, then 1,000, then 2,000.

Fans on both sides seemed to wonder why they felt so invested in the outcome.

“I’ve got no idea what this is for, but I hate losing.”

“It’s oddly important to me that Slippery Rock wins.”

“Aye I don’t care what this is for but I like winning sooooooo can y’all go ahead and vote Dordt for a pimp.”

That afternoon, Slippery Rock widened its lead. Dordt, the smaller institution, felt the game slipping out of reach.

The college called on friends for help. Hoekstra, perhaps to one-up the Slippery Rock mayor, asked Iowa’s senators, governor, and lieutenant governor for their votes. Dordt’s main Twitter account made pleas to the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, whose long-shot basketball team shocked the country last week by knocking off the No. 1 seed in the real March Madness tournament.

“Can you help a fellow underdog out?” Dordt asked. But UMBC did not respond.

By the evening, it was over. Slippery Rock won the game with 58 percent of the nearly 4,000 votes cast.

Afterward, the Dordt president invited me to visit the campus, in Sioux Center, Iowa, to see everything it has to offer besides a funny name. It’s perfectly natural for a college president to try to parlay a competition, even a silly one, into a marketing opportunity. The business of higher education is serious. Anytime somebody makes a list, whether it’s the National Collegiate Athletics Association or U.S. News & World Report, well-meaning leaders will try to use it to spread their good word.

The Best College Names Tournament wasn’t about that, so for now I’m content to co-sign the message that Slippery Rock’s athletics department graciously tweeted at its vanquished opponent:

“Major props to our new friends at Dordt.”

Speaking of Slippery Rock, we now have arrived at the championship. On the other side of the bracket, the Moody Bible Institute cut a dramatic path of its own, beating the Wright Graduate University for the Realization of Human Potential and Visible Music College. Vote by clicking into the tweet below:

We have reached the end of the Best College Names Tournament. The final shodown: SLIPPERY ROCK UNIVERSITY vs. MOODY BIBLE INSTITUTE. Voting is now open!

— Steve Kolowich (@stevekolowich) March 22, 2018

Correction (3/24/2018, 10:05 a.m.): A previous version of this article misspelled the name of St. John Fisher College. It is St. John Fisher, not St. John Fischer.

Steve Kolowich writes about ordinary people in extraordinary times, and extraordinary people in ordinary times. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.