One of these days, the Steelheads are going to have a logo with a steelhead on it.

Their old logo had a steel head — or at least a steel mask — but it did not have a steelhead. A steelhead, for the record, is a kind of trout. Everyone from anywhere near Idaho is reading that sentence and asking if I'm also going to say that the sky is blue, but not everyone knows these things. The new logo doesn't bother with steelheads, steel heads, steel, or heads. It has a mountain, some trees, and the ubiquitous puck. All in all, it looks more like someone tried to spruce up the logo for Prudential Insurance than like someone tried to spruce up the logo for the Idaho Steelheads. And they—

Oh. My. God.

Sorry, the horror of what I just said just dawned on me. Let me just stop right here and apologize. The "spruce" pun was completely unintentional, but it was still awful. I should be and am ashamed of myself.

Let us now continue with our review, already in progress.

—did a pretty strange job of, er, fixing it up. There's some seriously weird light shining on that mountain. The west (I'm going to assume the left side of the picture is to the west and the right side is to the east) side of the mountain is in shadow, but the trees on the east side are darker than the trees on the west. I'm not sure how that works. I'm also not sure how anyone managed to grow trees so big that a mere half dozen of them cover the entire mountain. And what has any of this got to do with anything in the team's name?

I understand that trying to make a fish looks tough presents certain challenges. So I can understand trying to come up with other approaches to making a logo for the name "Steelheads". But the meaning of "approach" implies that you actually go toward it. This logo looks like someone took one look at the name and designed a logo that runs as fast as it can in the other direction. There's not even a freaking river in this logo as far as I can tell. And it would have been so easy. All they needed to do was replace the puck with A FREAKING FISH! It wouldn't have affected the composition of the logo much at all (the body of the fish could go where the "action lines" currently are), and would have turned the mountain and trees into cool context instead of daft distraction.

But instead, we get this: a logo that looks like it was designed by the Idaho Tourism Board. I'd say the only thing that's missing is a potato, but I suspect the Idaho Tourism Board is desperate to make us forget about potatoes. After all, the point of a tourism board is to get people to visit you, and the only people who consider potatoes a valid reason to visit you are starving Irishmen from the middle of the 19th Century. I wouldn't have been surprised to find out that the Idaho Tourism Board's slogan is "There's more to Idaho than Potatoes!" I even went to www.visitid.org to find out if that was the slogan. The slogan, as it turns out, is simply "Idaho". That's it. There's not even an exclamation point; it's just "Idaho".

Such a slogan is either the most pathetically uninspired slogan ever devised, or absolutely brilliant in its minimalist elegance. You can guess which I think this is. Some places could get away with such a slogan. California, for example, doesn't really need to say anything other than "California". The same goes for Texas. Love these places or hate them, but even if you've never been to them you already know them pretty well, and simply saying the name tells you all you need to know. It will either make you say "You know, I've been meaning to visit there" (in which case it's done its job) or it will make you say "There? I don't think so!" (in which case they probably weren't going to convince you, so why waste the effort to say anything else?).

But not many other states could get away with that. Even New York couldn't pull this one off — lots of people would assume the entire state was like New York and Buffalo, which couldn't be further from the truth. (One of my favorite vacation spots is Hammondsport, a village of less than one thousand people on one of the Finger Lakes. It's got some of the most beautiful scenery I've ever seen, and it's about three hours to the closest city of more than 50,000 people.) Certainly Idaho can't get away with this, because you think of Idaho and you instantly think of mountains of potatoes. So when the people in charge of Idaho Tourism come up with a slogan that's simply the name of the state, what they are saying is, "You can't think of anything other than a bunch of freaking potatoes, and that drives us nuts, but you know what? Neither can we! If we could, we'd have actually come up with a damn slogan!"

I don't really have a good transition here, but I feel I would be remiss in my duties as Self-Appointed Smartass Laureate is I didn't share this amusing tidbit with you. The scientific name for the Steelheads, it turns out, is Oncorhynchus mykiss. No, seriously: the species name is "mykiss". I first read that on Wikipedia, and my first thought was that this had to be another one of those inaccuracies that Wikipedia is infamous for. I didn't even realize Latin had the letter "Y", so the name shouldn't have even been possible from my perspective. But it turns out this is accurate.

Fans of teams that play the Steelheads, I encourage you to use this factoid to make signs to taunt the Steelheads the next time they visit your arena. If you're a good artist, draw a trout with really feminine lips that appear to be wearing lipstick and the caption "Give me a kiss". Nobody in the arena will have the slightest idea what the hell it means, but they'll still laugh. And the players for the Steelheads will still know that they're being taunted, even if they're not particularly certain just how. So even though it's a a joke so obscure and intellectual that Dennis Miller would be jealous, it will still work.

Final Score: 23 points.
Penalties: Region (egregious), 5 pts; Irrelevance, 14 pts; Name-Logo, 2 pts; Equip-Logo, 5 pts.
Bonuses: Local, -3 pts.