Honestly, how do you screw up something this easy?

The Calgary Flames' AHL team moved this past summer from Omaha to the Quad City area, and it was announced that the team would be called the Quad City Flames. I knew right then what the logo would be. It was obvious: they were going to take the flaming "C" and alter it slightly to be a flaming "Q". Nice, simple, and easy.

But no. For some reason, they felt like the flaming "Q" wasn't enough, so they made the logo be both a flaming "Q" and a flaming ""C". and in the process, they ruined it. It could have survived the addition of the "C" if they had put the flames on the "Q" but left them off the "C". But they left the flames on both. It just doesn't work. Somehow, they screwed up the logo's compositional balance in the process.

Truth be told, they might have even gotten away with flames on both letters if they hadn't staggered them the way they did. If they had simply aligned them horizontally, it might have been okay. But this is just muddled. Half of the flames on the "C" get lost, as does the cross stroke of the "Q" if you don't have a good look at it. From a short distance, it starts to look like "OC". From a farther distance, it starts to look like an amorphous blob.

Of course, all this is based on the false premise that naming the team "Quad City Flames" was a bright idea to begin with. It wasn't. Minor league teams should be trying to establish their own identity, not piggyback off their parent team's. Exceptions to this can be made when the parent team is fairly close and/or has a strong enough tradition that people want to be affiliated with it. The Calgary Flames simply don't fit the bill. Tell people in a randomly-chosen American city that they're getting the AHL affiliate for the Montreal Canadiens or the Detroit Red Wings, and they might be excited. Tell them they're getting the AHL affiliate for the Calgary Flames, and their response is likely to be, "Really? That's nice." This isn't meant as a criticism of the Flames; they're one of roughly twenty-five NHL teams about whom that's true. But they should have borne that in mind and picked some other name for their AHL affiliate. Heck, it would have been so easy to drop the "Ak-Sar-Ben", re-appropriate the logo, and simply call the team the Quad City Knights. "Knights" is one of those classic, all-purpose names that works reasonably well anywhere. The Knights logo was kind of cool except for the part where they duplicated the flame effect from the "C" on the back of the knight's helmet, which made it look like the knight was losing the fight against the fire-breathing dragon. But even this worked a lot better than the name or logo the team is currently using.

And what about the river that defines the Quad City area? Surely there's a way to work a river reference into the team name. I'm not saying I was hoping for anything like the "Quad City River Bandits" or "Quad City Riverhawks" (the names of the area's baseball and basketball team, respectively). But I'm sure there's something they could do that would have the river reference and still be classy.

Or maybe not. Maybe they need to follow the lead of teams like the Macon Whoopee and Milwaukee Admirals (in Milwaukee's case I'm referring to their logo, not their name) and go with something that's so bad it's good. In fact, they could merge the "river" reference with the parent's team name and pick the utterly nonsensical name "Quad City River Flames".

Oh, wait: they're in Quad City, not Cleveland.. No river flames here.

But if they were in Cleveland they could use that, and they could use the exact same logo that Calgary uses. And as should be abundantly clear by now, that would be a much better logo than this one, too.

Final Score: 13 points.
Penalties: Region, 3 pts; Offspring, 5 pts; Yucky-Logo, 5 pts.
Bonuses: None.