The University of Colorado Colorado Springs is thinking about changing its name.

Again.

This has been a long, strange journey.

Established in 1965 as the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, the school has long been know as UCCS. It’s established, it’s known and it’s the only UCCS in the United States. That makes it a very strong brand.

But in the mid 1990s, someone in the administration decided that it could be pronounced “ucks” rather than saying the letters separately, which they also decided was ucky. That was too close to “yucks” for their taste.

So after much discussion and a few highly paid consultants, they rebranded the school “CU-The Springs.” Shortly afterward, the chancellor got another job and there was an immediate outcry to remove that hated moniker and go back to UCCS.

That’s when the regents stepped in. Since the flagship campus is often known as CU-Boulder, they decided that consistency was needed throughout the system and decreed that the campus would now be CU-Colorado Springs.

But CU-Colorado Springs is much too long for use past the first reference. The shortened CUCS is clunky. They tried an alternative, CU-CS, which was also clunky. It morphed into UC-Colorado Springs, which begged the question “why not go back to UCCS?”

So just shy of 20 years ago, they formed a committee to end the madness and give the campus a permanent identity.

At the time, I had the title of assistant athletic director although my job was sports information director, which was not dissimilar to what I do now. But because of that title, I was in a lot of committees.

Universities love committees. They rarely do anything without having one. Since my boss, then-Athletic Director Stephen Kirkham, disliked committees, he would often send me and my dubious title to serve instead.

One such committee was the aforementioned naming committee.

A consulting firm was hired and the committee consulted with the consulting firm. After much consulting, the firm came to the brilliant conclusion to drop the “at” in the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and take advantage of the well-branded UCCS shortened version.

I thought it ironic that the big change was to make the name of a university grammatically incorrect. University of Colorado Colorado Springs sounds like you have a stutter.

So now they’re gathering feedback on going back to CU Colorado Springs. The other universities in the CU system are CU Boulder, CU Denver and the CU Anschutz, the health science campus based in Aurora.

I can’t help but wonder what the administration that started this mess would think about this change.

By their logic, CUCS would be pronounced as either cucks or cukes. Cucks is a dubious term as it is the common shortening for cuckold. Cukes is short for nothing, really, but sounds suspiciously like cucumbers.

That means the school sports teams will be reminiscent of either a bedroom beta male or proto-pickles. Neither is very intimidating.

You can’t make this stuff up.