Iowa Chops

33

The name "Iowa Chops" is marketing bullshit.

On some level, that's obvious. Technically speaking, all branding is a form of marketing; with the exception of some of the really old teams in baseball, all team names are a form of branding. And, of course, all marketing is marketing bullshit. So you could stick any team name in the sentence "The name '_____________' is marketing bullshit" and it would be true. But when I say the name "Iowa Chops" is marketing bullshit, I'm working on a different level. What I mean is that the team name owes itself to a piece of marketing bullshit from about thirty years ago.

I am speaking of the "Iowa chop" (note that "chop" here is singular and has a lowercase "C"). This was a concept created by the Iowa Pork Producers Association in 1976. The IPPA is, of course, the place to go for all things swine-related in an area bounded by the Missouri River, 43°30' North, the Mississippi River, and whatever the hell Iowa's southern border is defined as. They have all kinds of useful information. Do you want to know how to perform an autopsy on a pig? Head to the Iowa Pork Producers Association website and order A Guide for Swine Necropsy. While you're there, be sure to click on the link for recipes. I don't know about you, but nothing puts me in the mood to eat pork like a book on how to dissect a pig.

As I said, the IPPA also spent our bicentennial coming up with the "Iowa chop" to commemmorate what makes this country so great. An "Iowa chop" is apparently just a really thick pork chop. Someone, no doubt, earned a ton of money for thinking that one up. And that's why they're in marketing and I'm not. I'd have done something stupid like try to convince people that my client's pork products actually tasted better. But taste isn't what the Midwestern mind thinks about (I've spent enough time in Indiana to know this). What matters there is getting a big meal and thus making your ass as big as possible. And this is the beauty behind the Iowa chop: it may not taste any better than pork chops from the rest of the country, but it sure is bigger!

And this, apparently, is the concept that the owners of Des Moines' hockey team wanted people to think of when they named the team. Not quality, but size. Indeed, if you think about it, by naming the team after a thicker-than-usual pork chop, they were in a very real sense calling their own players a bunch of fat pigs.

With a name like "Chops", you know even before you see the logo that it's going to be laughable. And in this regard the logo does not disappoint (this is probably the only regard in which it doesn't, in fact). The logo is a drawing of a grey pig's decapitated head smeared with either blood or war paint, I'm not sure which. The pig is baring its teeth, meaning that the mouth is open just wide enough to insert an apple in preparation for a medieval feast. (It should surprise no one to learn that I have seen pictures on the internet where someone took the Chops logo and photoshopped an apple into it.)

The shading on the pig is, incidentally, hideous. Even if I were to pretend the concept behind the logo was a good one (it's not), this would still be one of the ugliest logos around just because of the color.

So to sum this up, this team's name and logo are every bit as bad as the South Carolina Stingrays' are good. The Stingrays' name is original and evokes images of a fearsome creature; The Chops name is derivative of a marketing campaign and evokes images of the other white meat. The Stingrays' logo is well balanced with a strong design and classic colors; the Chops' logo is an amateurish drawing with a laughable design and ugly colors. All I can figure is that with both the name and the logo, this team was aiming for a sort of ironic "so bad it's good" effect.

They failed.

Final Score: 33 points.
Penalties: Region (egregious), 5 pts; Wordplay, 7 pts; Name-Logo, 2 pts; Colorful, 13 pts; Yucky-Logo, 5 pts; Yucky-Name, 4 pts.
Bonuses: Local, -3 pts.