Quad City Mallards

13

How many times am I going to write a review for Quad City, anyway? This is the fourth review for this city. First it was the old Mallards with their "Plucky Duck" logo. Then it was the old Mallards when they reinvented their original logo (the original was too long ago to get reviewed here, or else I'd be on my fifth). Then it was the Quad City Flames. Now, it's the Mallards Mk II.

In a situation like this, comparison is impossible to avoid. So let's just dive into it. The name, oddly, isn't as good as it was before. Well, it is as good as it was before (how could it not be?), but last time around it had originality on its side. Now it's an homage, and I for one am getting tired of teams in this league re-using the names of older teams in the area. Five of the league's seven teams do this; one of the remaining two is the first professional hockey team ever to play in that city and thus doesn't have a name to reuse. Here's a hint, guys: Recycling physical materials is good for the environment, but recycling incorporeal items like names doesn't help much of anything. But it is a good name nonetheless. Using "Mallards" instead of "Ducks" makes for a more distinct image, and also gets away from the Disney connotations of the name "Ducks". And one of the basic rules of sports team names is that just about any bird works as a name. There was once a team called the "Canaries", for crying out loud. If "Canaries" works, then you know "Mallards" works.

One thing that was not recycled was the logo — any of them. Instead we have a brand new logo, and although there are some issues with it, all in all it's pretty good. The mallard head itself is drawn with a minimum of nonsense — the only point of criticism is the all-white eye, and even that was probably necessary given the shading. The wordmark is okay but for the odd-looking a's. But the teal and the grey bother me. I can't exactly complain about teal being a trendy color, since that trended ended roughly a decade ago, but I still have traumatic memories of the 1995-96 season when eight new teams debuted and fourteen of them had teal and magenta logos. Besides, teal and green is just a weird combination. And why grey instead of black? An early version of the logo I saw had black where this has the darker shade of green, and it made a bit more sense then. But not anymore. It's just a wishy-washy color. Indeed, that's the one problem with this logo. With the possible exception of the dark green, there's not a strong color in here. I think they'd have been better off replacing the teal with a bold royal blue, and getting rid of the grey altogether. Seriously, just replace it with white (although perhaps a thinner stripe than the grey is). With the royal blue instead of the teal, I think you could do that and it would look fine.

In spite of these criticisms, it's still a good logo. Even if the colors aren't bold, the design is. I'm not sure how good it will look from the nosebleed seats (an issue more teams should give thought to when picking logos), but on the cover of the program it will work well. This is at least as good as the best logo the old Mallards ever used, probably better.

But then there are the jerseys. I'm fine with green jerseys. I think there should be more of them. But not this shade of green. The logo would have looked really cool on, say, a hunter green jersey. But this is an eyesore. I mean that literally: I think that looking at these jerseys for two or three hours could make a person's eyes start to hurt.

Oh, well. At least the jerseys aren't magenta.

Final Score: 13 points.
Penalties: Region, 3 pts; Name-Logo, 2 pts; Colorful, 13 pts.
Bonuses: Cool-Logo, -5 pts.