“It’s OK. I can deal with it,” Chris Veit, a senior mascot from Overland Park, said of the gigantic Jayhawk that was painted on the floor of Allen Fieldhouse. “I think it might be a little big. My personal favorite was when they had the state of Kansas with a Jayhawk where Lawrence is.”

The yellow rectangle Veit favored was replaced with a replica of the flag that flies above Fraser Hall on game days — a blue rectangle with a white vertical stripe and a big, red K — with a chunk of the northeast corner removed so the design maintained the shape of the state.

With a new coach, a new athletic director and a new season approaching, James Naismith Court has been wiped clean again. The new design has a whopping 251/2-foot tall Jayhawk at center court.

“Jayhawks can never be too big,” Jennifer Hine, a sophomore cheerleader from Topeka, said. “I like it better.”

Hine wasn’t alone. KU fans approved of the new look. As of Friday night, 371 readers had responded to an online poll on kusports.com. Fifty-nine percent (221) said they favored the new design, while 24 percent (90) said they liked the Jayhawk but would have preferred a smaller version. Thirteen percent (47) liked the state of Kansas at center court, and 4 percent (13) voted for none of the above.

“It reminds me a lot of the football field,” Abby Huckvale, a Winfield senior and a member of the marching band, said. “They’re similar. It could be a unifying thing for the athletic department. It’s kind of big, but it’s our mascot, and we should be proud of it.”

It certainly is big. The Jayhawk on James Naismith Court is, in fact, two feet taller than the Jayhawk at midfield at Memorial Stadium, according to KU director of facilities Brad Nachtigal.

First-year AD Lew Perkins said he and first-year men’s basketball coach Bill Self didn’t compare the size of the mascots on the school’s two most prominent playing surfaces.

But Perkins wanted his new bird to be a big one.

“Coach Self and I got into discussions when I got here,” he said. “We wanted to change the court. I said, ‘If we’re going to put the Jayhawk in, let’s make it as big as possible.’ I’ve found out pretty quickly how important the Jayhawk is to people here.”

Perkins wants to capitalize on the fact that the Jayhawk is one of the most unique and recognizable mascots in the country. The giant Jayhawk will be hard to miss during nationally televised games, and that’s good for recruiting and marketing.

“We want to start branding KU,” Perkins said. “That’s important to us.”

Viewers flipping channels will know right away they’re watching a KU basketball game when they see the massive mascot. Even the former Connecticut AD was taken aback by the size of the logo on a recent stroll through the fieldhouse.

“I walked in there the other day, and it surprised me,” Perkins said of the new design. “It’s huge, but it’s great. Everybody’s telling me how great it is. I’m sure with the painting complete it’ll be beautiful.”

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But not everyone agrees to the bigger-is-better philosophy.

“It’s not a basketball court anymore. It’s a billboard,” said 1963 KU graduate Terry Murphy, a Minneapolis lawyer who responded to the online poll. “They have no regard for the intelligence of the viewing public. You don’t need a billboard.”

Murphy wasn’t the only voice of dissent. Several fans compared the Jayhawk — which nearly stretches from three-point line to three-point line — to the big Buffalo that used to cover the court at Colorado’s Coors Events Center.

In short, they didn’t want their Jayhawk supersized.

Many readers offered their own suggestions. Several fans wrote that they would prefer the fierce-looking Jayhawk of the 1940s to today’s smiling Jayhawk because it would more accurately “depict the times in which we live” and also the “grit and determination of our student-athletes.”

A few readers were disappointed that KU is one of the few schools in the Big 12 that doesn’t have the conference logo on its court.

“It’s like being a referee,” Perkins said. “You can’t make everybody happy, but you have to make decisions that are right for the university.”