Huntsville Havoc

86

Oh, joy. It's a logo with a cartoony animal in it.

How novel.

I've reached the point where I've come up with an acronym for this particular crime. I call these logos "jackals" – short for Just Another Crappy Kartoon Animal Logo. And if you read this site regularly then you know how tired I am of them. I was half tempted to simply write the word "JACKAL" and let that be the sum total of my comment for this logo. But I owe you more. At the very least, I should explain what "jackal" means before I do something like that.

But now that I'm explained it, I feel free to pull that stunt in the future. So be prepared.

I'd like to say something nice here, but they're really not making it easy. I'll give them this: It's not a bear. That may be the sum total of nice things I can say about it: The totally gratuitous, irrelevant, cartoony animal is not a bear. I'm not sure that a werewolf (and rest assured they're getting the "anthropomorphization" penalty for this one, since a werewolf is nothing more than an anthropomorphized wolf) is exactly an improvement, but it's at least different. I suppose the red, black, and grey color scheme is kind of neat, too.

What is not neat is the way they drew the gloves. In a classic case of "we want to have it both ways", they decided they wanted to give the werewolf hockey gloves and sharp claws. How to accomplish this? By putting sharp claws on the gloves, of course! This is the worst example of a misplaced feature since the original Cincinnati Cyclones logo, which had eyebrows on a goalie mask.

And while I'm making unflattering comparisons to defunct teams, I'd also like to state for the record that the claw marks through the letters aren't nearly as clever as someone thinks they are. It was clever one time, when the Madison Monsters had clawmarks that were essentially through the front of the logo itself and you could only see the monster through the holes created by the claws. But that's it.

Lastly, I question the wisdom of the name. Given all the drama surrounding the ACHL/WHA2/SEHL/SPHL in the last few years, do we really want to draw attention to the chaos that reigns in the lowest rungs of hockey? It's basically equivalent to naming an NHL team the Lockouts. Accurate, perhaps, but poor marketing. It's especially poor marketing because it is impossible to draw a havoc, and you're left coming up with stupid ideas like werewolves.

There's an obvious solution here, which is to come up with a new name, and then come up with a new logo. I'd suggest coming up with a new league, but there's been enough of that in the Southeast lately. But definitely change names and logos. It sounds drastic, but it's really a minor change. Really.

After all, I'm letting them keep the color scheme.

Final Score: 86 points.
Penalties: Singular, 6 pts; Alliteration, 2 pts; Cartoon, 17 pts; Anthropomorphization, 10 pts; Irrelevance, 14 pts; Name-Logo, 2 pts; Equip-Logo (quaduply egregious), 25 pts; Yucky-Logo, 5 pts; Yucky-Name, 5 pts.
Bonuses: None.