Oklahoma City Redhawks

100

When I came up with the term "BIC" (baseball in circle), it was to give a convenient label to what I thought must be the most boring type of logo imaginable: a drawing of a baseball, with a circle around the baseball, the team name written either in the circle or across the baseball, and little else. But looking at this logo, I realize I was wrong on one key point: BICs are not the most boring logo imaginable, or at least they aren't the sole possessors of that distinction. This logo is just as bad. Again, we've got the circle with the team name. Instead of the circle going around a baseball, it goes around a monogram. And then there are the crossed baseball bats. Yawn.

The bats somehow manage to make the logo less interesting. That's actually impressive: how do you make something more boring by adding things to it? If you imagine this logo without the bats (and better still, without the little baseball next to the "K"), There there's a certain elegance to the logo. It's still not a good logo, but at least it's a clean logo. But the baseball bats send a message to the viewer. That message is, "Yeah, we know. The logo needs something more. But we couldn't be bothered to figure out what that something was, so we said, 'Ah, screw it, slap a couple of bats on it and let's get out of here. It's happy hour at the bar.' It's not like we actually care or anything."

Here is my humble suggestion for what that something was: a red hawk. There, was that so hard?

It couldn't have been that hard, because the team used to have a hawk (albeit not a red one) in their logo. That was a fairly nifty logo. Maybe it was a little on the corporate side, but it could easily have been tweaked to work. Instead, they threw the baby out with the bathwater, and then...well, if I was going to continue this analogy I'd have to say something like "and then they filled the bathtub up with water from the toilet," but that's disgusting so I won't say it.

What I will say is that there's really no excuse for this. When a team has a name like Tides or Power, I can understand if the logo designer gives up and draws a logo based more on the letters in the team name than on the team name itself. After all, it's kind of hard to draw a power. But any artist worth his salt ought to be able to draw a bird. And any designer worth his salt ought to be able to come up with the idea of putting a hawk in the logo of a team with the word "hawks" in its name. Clearly, somewhere in Oklahoma City is a logo designer who isn't worth his salt, or at least one who is on a low-sodium diet. I don't want to criticize someone for being on a low-sodium diet, because we all need to watch our blood pressure. But I need to keep an eye on my blood pressure too, Mr. Designer. And logos this uninspired don't do anything for my blood pressure.

Final Score: 100 points.
Penalties: Compound, 34 pts; Equipment (doubly egregious), 42 pts; Letter, 24 pts.
Bonuses: None.