“They might as well drop the name, and hold a 'name-the-team' contest among the fans out there,” Vernon Bellecourt, president of the National Council on Racism in Sports and Media, said Friday from his office in Minneapolis.

The Utes, Bellecourt said, rank with Florida State's Seminoles, the University of Illinois' Fighting Illini and the University of North Dakota's Fighting Sioux as college mascot names that most offend Indians.

Bellecourt, an Anishinabe Ojibwe and a member of the American Indian Movement's grand governing council, had harsh words for Indians who go along with such mascots.

"Before [universities] seriously decide to change, they run out and find some old hang-around-the-fort Uncle Tom-Tom, a Ute in the case of Utah . . . who says, 'Oh, we just love the Runnin' Utes,' " Bellecourt said. "Of course, that's exactly what they did to Martin Luther King."

But Forrest Cuch, executive director of the Utah Division of Indian Affairs and a member of the Ute tribe, contends the U. "has been very respectful of the mascot issue" since the 1980s.

"Indian people are proud now that the Ute is the mascot for the University of Utah," Cuch said. "Other than that, there are no other landmarks, so to speak, that there were Indian people in the [Salt Lake] Valley."

Cuch said teams should change nicknames that are disrespectful to American Indians. "Where the names are blatant, like the [NFL's] Washington Redskins, that's a no-no," Cuch said. " 'Redskins' is not respectful. They should change that." To Cuch, "Fighting Illini" is also a no-no.

Bellecourt said he believes "even the Utes and other Indians - and others who understand racism that is institutionalized into America's favorite pastime, sports - would join us in demanding that the University of Utah now start the process to come up with a new name and a new mascot."

The group also has urged the owners of the NFL's Redskins and Kansas City Chiefs, along with baseball's Atlanta Braves and Cleveland Indians, to change their names. He said Friday's NCAA decision "should send a strong message to the owners in Kansas City, Washington, Cleveland and Atlanta."

spmeans@sltrib.com