Last week I profiled the Mississippi RiverKings, who are just barely even in Mississippi (they play just a few miles from the Tennessee border). This week we look at the Mississippi Sea Wolves, who are also just barely in Mississippi, since they play within a few miles of the Gulf Coast in the city of Biloxi. These are the only teams currently playing in Mississippi. There used to be a team fairly close to the middle of Mississippi. They were thus the only team with any hope (admittedly not much) of actually drawing fans from across the state of Mississippi. So of course, they did not call themselves "Mississippi". They sensibly called themselves "Jackson", after the city they played in.

With a name like "Sea Wolves", you'd be forgiven for believing that the name was some kind of local reference. After all, they're right on the coast, right? There must be some kind of local reference here, right? There must be sea wolves off the coast of Mississippi, right?

Wrong.

The first thing you have to do in establishing whether there are sea wolves off the coast is to establish just what a sea wolf is. Since the phrase has several meanings, you have options here. For one thing, there's a book titled The Sea Wolf by Jack London. There may well be copies of this book in Biloxi. I don't think that counts, however. One wouldn't say that there are Oliver Twists in Biloxi, would one? And in any case, Biloxi is no more likely to have copies of this book than Roanoke, Virginia or Spokane, Washington, or Honolulu, Hawaii.

A sea wolf is also a type of fish. However, the fish called "sea wolf" is a coldwater fish, and is more likely to be seen off the coast of Greenland than off the coast of Mississippi.

Or a Sea Wolf can be a type of submarine. This is the answer that most people, if asked to guess, would say is the source of the team name. There's a naval base in Biloxi, they'd say, and there are Sea Wolves at the naval base in Biloxi. They'd be wrong. There is an air force base in Biloxi, but no naval base (there is a naval reserve base in nearby Gulfport, but as best as I can tell from Google maps it isn't even on the actual coast and thus has no submarines at all). There are only three submarines in the Seawolf class — the USS Seawolf, USS Connecticut, and USS Jimmy Carter — and none of them were even stationed in Mississippi (all three were originally stationed in Connecticut and are now stationed in Washington state).

"Sea Wolf" is also the name of a naval missile system (in the United Kingdom), another name for the killer whale (whose range does manage to include Mississippi, but only because it includes pretty much every inch of coastline in the continental U.S., and for that matter roughly half of the coastline to be found anywhere in the world), a mascot for several colleges (the closest being in New York), and an indie rock band (based in California). In other words, the closest thing to being a local reference requires allowing "local reference" to involve anything in the area no matter how ubiquitous. By this argument you might as well say a team called the Mississippi People would have local reference.

That being said, "Sea Wolves" isn't really a bad name. Anything with "wolf" in it sounds rather fierce, and Biloxi is right next to the sea (Yeah, I know the name is the Gulf of Mexico. But Wikipedia lists the Gulf of Mexico as one of the seas in the Atlantic Ocean, and Wikipedia is never wrong, right?). So I'm not saying I dislike the name. I'm just spending six paragraphs explaining why I'm not giving them the "Local" bonus. I do this in the futile hope that it will prevent someone from sending me an e-mail telling me I forgot to give them the bonus. It'll probably happen in less than a week anyway.

But while I like the name, the logo isn't so great. It's standard anthropomorphized cartoon animal fare. At least this one isn't playing hockey, but that's about all that can be said in its favor. The chevron effect is sort of nice, but the jagged bottom of the blue patch makes it look like someone was trying too hard to be edgy. Finally, red, blue, and brown has to be one of the worst color schemes I've ever seen. The brown outline on the red letters in the word "Sea Wolves" is awful.

But I will give them one thing: unlike the other "Mississippi" team, at least they don't have a turtle in the logo.

Final Score: 42 points.
Penalties: Region (egregious), 5 pts; Cartoon, 17 pts; Name-Logo, 2 pts; Colorful, 13 pts; Ripoff, 4 pts; Yucky-Logo, 5 pts.
Bonuses: None.