Normally the scoring is the last thing I do in these write-ups, but today I decided to change things up a little and do it first. And before working out the actual score, I decided to see if I knew my own system well enough to look at the logo and estimate a score and come close.

I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I guessed it would be in the ballpark of 60. As you can see, I wasn't even close. I could deal with being 10 or so off, but I was off by over 50% on a scoring system that I made up myself. That's pretty damn pathetic if you ask me.

Part of the problem is just how many penalties this sucker manages to earn. It managed to pick up just about every logo-based penalty there is. And truth be told, I think I may have been too nice. I gave it an egregious anthropomorphization penalty because they put eyes and hands on a tornado, but I'm thinking it should be doubly-egregious because they actually put a freaking bandage on the thing. Someone, somewhere, please explain to me how you apply a bandage to-- no, on second thought, don't. If you know the answer to that question, you're clearly doing so many different drugs that you're probably no longer capable of coherent conversation.

I could, of course, just poke fun at the teal, the eyebrows suspended in midair, and the hockey stick, and call it a day. But it's the attention to detail in this logo that impresses me (if "impress" is the right word...it makes an impression, I'll give it that much.) First, there are the dark teal rings around the, er, player. At first they looked like hula hoops to me. But something about the presence of those rings and the general shape of the body reminds me of a Dr. Seuss drawing. I think there was a drawing very similar to this in "Horton Hears a Who Get Smashed into the Boards by Chris Chelios". Or maybe it was in "The Grinch Who Stole the 2004-05 NHL Season".

There's also the name. Not really the name itself, though: what gets me is the blue/teal streak (that's where the "Fade" penalty comes from, in case anyone is wondering) that implies movement. If you follow it back to its source, you see that the tornado actually hit the name with its stick in such a way that not only caused it to grow tremendously (since the stick seems to be as close as the name and the name was clearly tiny when the stick hit it), but also caused it to loop backwards around his head and back in front of him like a boomerang. Wayne Gretzky couldn't make a shot like that.

I am, incidentally, girding myself for the e-mail I know I'm going to get over the irrelevance penalty. I just have a feeling that someone is going to tell me that "fury" is an informal name for a tornado. The problem is that I can't find any indication of such usage. And since I see no evidence of such usage, I have to rule that "fury" looks nothing like a tornado and penalize them for it.

Of course, this is the problem that all teams with abstract names have. What, exactly, does "fury" look like? Every time I hear the word, I think of the old Matchbox "Turbo Fury" I had when I was a kid. It was part of their "Rola-matic" line, which meant that it had moving parts that served little purpose other than to make little kids say, "Cool!" Of course, I was a little kid, so that's what I said.

The moving part in question was the two off-white plastic pieces. When you moved the car, those pieces turned. It wasn't quite as cool as the "Stoat", which was a military vehicle with a guy looking through binoculars who moved left and right as the vehicle moved, but it was still pretty nifty. And I didn't even understand the significance of the number "69" at the time. (The reason that number is on the car incidentally, is that the cars made by Matchbox were all numbered 1-75 so that anal-retentive kids like my brother and I would make it a point to get every one. The Turbo Fury was No. 69 in the series.)

It wasn't until years later -- in fact, it wasn't until five minutes ago as I went looking for a picture of a Matchbox Turbo Fury -- that I knew there was an actual car called the "Turbo Fury". It was made by Chrysler, and didn't look anywhere near as cool as the one Matchbox made.

So that's my idea of what the Muskegon Fury's logo should look like. Or maybe you could get Shakespearean and put an angry woman on the logo. But a tornado just doesn't make a lot of sense. Even before you give it eyebrows.

Final Score: 97 points.
Penalties: Singular, 6 pts; Cartoon, 17 pts; Anthropomorphization, (egregious), 10 pts; Irrelevance, 14 pts; Name-Logo, 2 pts; Equip-Logo (quadruply-egregious), 25 pts; Colorful, 13 pts; Fade, 6 pts; Yucky-Logo, 5 pts.
Bonuses: None