I am not, by nature, a violent person. I don't resort to using violence to solve very many problems. I'm the kind of person who, unless it's a cockroach, will coax a bug in my house onto a piece of paper and carry him outside rather than kill it. (My wife denies that there has ever been a single cockroach in our house, although we apparently get these things called "water bugs", which look exactly like cockroaches and act exactly like them but god help me if I actually call one of these water bugs a "cockroach" in her presence. For the record, I kill "water bugs", too.)

But while I don't generally resort to violence, I do often have somewhat violent urges. I do occasionally get the desire to push one of my co-workers out of one of the windows in our third-story office. I do occasionally wish I had a machine gun mounted to the front of my car. And every time I am exposed to a song by the Goo Goo Dolls, something about Johnny Rzeznick's whiny voice makes me want to punch him in the mouth. (This would be a bigger issue if I hadn't given up on commercial radio years ago, but I'll save that rant for another time and another place.)

Right now, I'm looking at this logo and thinking that somebody needs a kick in the butt.

The problem is that this logo is such an obvious ripoff of the old Fresno Falcons logo -- which was, in turn, an obvious ripoff of the Washington Capitals logo. I've heard, but can not confirm, that the Fresno Falcons changed their logo under threat of a lawsuit from the Washington Capitals. This one has changed enough from the Capitals to avoid a lawsuit, but it's hard to deny the similarity to the similarity.

Mind you, it's still an improvement over their old logo. That one featured such wonderful touches as the god-awful blue/green-and-black color scheme that was so popular in the mid-90's and lettering that looked like something a high-school kid doodled in his notebook in the mid-80's. Not to mention that something about the eyebrow (think about that one for a second: the bird had eyebrows) gave it a look that somehow reminds me of Groucho Marx in the mid-30's. And while Groucho was an extremely talented man, he was never going to win People magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive" award, so including in a logo elements that remind me of him isn't exactly a good thing.

But while the new logo doesn't remind me of Groucho Marx, it does remind me of the Hunchback of Notre Dame. I suspect that if any falcon that actually had that kind of curvature wouldn't be able to fly, and would wind up starving to death. Look, I realize that there have been so many teams named after raptors in the history of sports that it's hard to come up with something new and good, but I have to believe they didn't have to resort to this.

As for the name, long term readers have already figured out that I like it. I always like the classic names. And it turns out that this one is even a local reference of sorts: according to Wikipedia, the original owners "named the team after Andy and Amelia, a pair of nesting peregrine falcons that was a popular local civic symbol." Fair enough. That was actually kind of clever.

Which is more than I can say for the logo.

Final Score: 30 points.
Penalties: Cartoon, 17 pts; Name-logo, 2 pts; Equip-logo, 5 pts; Ripoff, 4 pts; Yucky-Logo, 5 pts.
Bonuses: Local, -3 pts.