For years the Columbus Cottonmouths have had one of the better logos in minor league hockey (reproduced below). It had the head-on perspective that worked so well, a classic color scheme, and a relative lack of gratuitous hockey references in it. There were a couple of minor flaws -- it was a bit too symmetrical, and the yellow teeth made me wonder if snakes were an untapped market for Crest White Strips -- but all in all this was the sort of logo you wanted to hold up to the owners of the Lubbock Cotton Kings and scream, "See? This is what logos look like when you don't hire designers who smoke crack!"

So there was definitely an element of risk in creating a new logo. Sure, they could have improved a bit, but they could have also gotten a lot worse. All in all, the track record of teams with good logos who redesign it is not a good record. So this was deinitely a pleasant surprise.

The new logo is not perfect, of course. The teeth still need a once over at the dentist, and they've introduced a few new issues. Most disturbing is the fact that the head seems way too large for the body, making the logo look like something from Precious Moments' new "Garden of Eden" series. But all in all they've actually managed to slightly improve the logo, so I definitely want to go easy on them. Besides, for all I know, a cottonmouth's head really is that large in proportion to it body. I've never seen one up close and don't intend to. I'm hardly one of these scaredy-cats who faints at the sight of a snake, but I don't go out of my way to look them in the eye, either.

I particularly like the way the snake is wrapped around the "C". This is good in several ways. First, it gets rid of the overwhelming symmetry. Second, I like it when teams use a single letter in their logo. Putting the whole name in can be a bit much, but letters tend to be strong visual elements that are a good way to anchor a logo (except for the letter "L", for some reason...don't ask me why). Third, coiling up is what snakes do. They usually don't coil themselves around capital letters, but all in all this is a much more accurate representation of what a cottonmouth does than the Quad City logo is a representation of what a mallard does.

The only part I'm not certain about is the replacement of yellow with that sort of beige. It's all just a little too "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" for me.

When I first wrote this page, I also made a comment about the snake's mouth being white, which I said made no sense because snakes don't have white mouths. Silly me. If I had been thinking about it, it might have occurred to me that there's a reason that cottonmouths are called cottonmouths. As it is, it took an e-mail from a reader (whose name I don't have because I deleted it like an idiot) to point out that cottonmouths do indeed have white mouths.

Still, even if the mouth wasn't the right color, so what? When the worst you can come up with to criticize is the color scheme the team used in the mouth, you know it's a pretty good logo.

Final Score: 5 points.
Penalties: Alliteration, 2 pts; Fade, 6 pts.
Bonuses: Local, -3 pts.