I nearly spit out my Labatt Blue when I saw the Flyers’ new mascot on Good Morning America today.

I wasn’t watching Good Morning America, mind you, I just saw the clip going around on Twitter and thought to myself, “holy cow, this thing is going viral.” Emphasis on “thing.”

Seems like the U.S.A. can’t get enough of gritty, because he’s a top Google search:

Now Kyle, who understands these things better than I do, says this tweet is misleading.

He says Gritty was the number nine search while the mascot did top Google trends, which are two different things. I should know these things since my wife works in digital sales, but I guess I don’t.

Explained after the jump:

That’s one hell of a list. Bill Cosby? The Steelers? Rod Rosenstein? I can’t say I give a rat’s ass about any of those things, but apparently America does.

The thing with Google search is that it’s just the raw number of times “Magnum PI” or “Dancing with the Stars” was typed in. Google trends basically takes into account your starting point and the growth of a certain topic over the course of time. So the reason Gritty was number one in that department is because he started from the bottom, now he’s here, with a ton of people searching for the Flyers’ mascot to see what all of the fuss is about.

Google trends is relative, if that makes sense. So nobody knew anything about Gritty at the start of the day, then it snowballed into a big viral online search. It’s relative popularity vs. absolute search volume data, in the most simple of terms.

Personally, I don’t care one way or another about the mascot. If the kids like it, cool.

I’m more offended by the name “Gritty,” because it just feels like the same old 1975 Flyers shit we’ve been dealing with since 1975. It’s all about mucking and grinding and fake Delco tough guys in the crowd who enjoy fighting, when the truth is that this team has some exciting young talent that needs to be the focus moving forward. “Old time hockey” can’t be a thing in this city. Give me talent and skill. Give me Ivan Provorov, Travis Konecny, and Nolan Patrick.