It's a new season here at the Bush League Factor, and boy, do we get to start off with a bang. I won't say that this is the worst logo around (not while the Charlotte Checkers are still using that mutated gopher, at least), but it's easily the most nonsensical.

First of all, there's the yeti. I don't know for a fact that it's supposed to be a yeti, but really, what else could it be? It's white like a yeti, and it looks like a gorilla, while the yeti is described as looking like a primitive human. Granted, gorillas aren't primitive humans, but a little artistic license is to be expected. (Syracuse clearly abused that license and should have it revoked for 30 days, but that's a separate issue.) I also didn't realize that yetis have yellow eyes, but I've never seen a yeti, so how would I know? I do know, thanks to an amazingly close look I got at one recently at the North Carolina Zoo, that gorillas do not have yellow eyes, so it's definitely not a gorilla. Nor, for that matter, are gorillas white. So a yeti it must be.

But boy, is that yeti suffering. There's the obvious fact that someone or something has put on hockey gloves and bashed it on both sides of the head. I'm not certain what did this, since we can't see anything other than the gloves themselves. It may even be that the yeti did it to himself. It could be magically-animated, disembodied gloves. It's hard to rule anything out. Were it not for the fingers, I couldn't even be certain those were gloves. If you glance at it for just half a second, it looks like a Princess Leia hairstyle.

He's also been hit very hard on the top of his head. Don't believe me? Just look at the crack coming halfway down his forehead. Someone cracked this poor creature's skull. And as a result, the hockey stick he was oh-so-gingerly holding in his mouth broke.

The stick is, of course, the next nonsensical element here. Given the size of the stick relative to the yeti's head, this is either a tiny stick or a humongous yeti head. But then look at the gloves. Those hands are almost as big as the yeti's head. I don't know about you, but my hands are much smaller than my head. If those are human-sized gloves -- and given the total lack of scale it's impossible to say -- then the yeti head is roughly half the size of a human head. A hobbit yeti, perhaps? But again, if the gloves are human sized, then the stick is about the size of an ink pen.

If, on the other hand, the stick is standard length, then the yeti must be at least two meters tall to have a head that size. And the gloves must belong to a creature that's even bigger.

Another disturbing possibility just occurred to me. Maybe the reason the gloves and head and disembodied are because they have literally been disembodied. Are we looking at a decapitated yeti head, mounted on the wall next to the gloves its killer was wearing when the foul deed was done? It would explain the relative size of the gloves to the head, if we presume that the killer spent time among the Shuar Indians of the Amazon before heading to Tibet. It doesn't quite explain the size of the stick, but if you can shrink a yeti head that small, you can do some fairly nifty things with the stick, too.

Ladies and gentlemen, I submit to you that this logo is evidence of a great crime against one of the most endangered species in the world and that the Syracuse Crunch know more about it than they're letting on. I suspect, but can not prove, that someone involved with the team is the perpetrator of this travesty. I suggest we begin a letter-writing campaign to the United Nations to demand that the Crunch 'fess up and tell us what they know about this calamity. Picketing the grounds of the Oncenter Complex is probably in order, too.

There are still some things I don't understand about this grisly trophy, though. First, there's the triangular block it has been mounted to. What happened to the bottom? You don't see much of the top, but what you can see indicates it's a well-made triangle with straight lines. But the bottom is ragged. What kind of effect were they going for? Was this intended to indicate the epic struggle between killer and killed? It is some highly stylized attempt to indicate blood dribbling out of the corpse? Or was the woodworker simply drunk?

Now, you may be wondering why I've concocted this outlandish tale of murder and pinning it on an inconspicuous minor league hockey team located in Upstate New York. Simply put, I'm just trying to figure out why the hell they have this logo. It's not because it's a good logo; that was obvious the moment I first laid eyes on it. And there is not a single thing in the entire logo -- except the word itself -- which has anything to do with the team's name. Well, I suppose the yeti's head did get "crunched" when it got hit over the head, but that's a bit of a reach if you ask me.

Not that you really could come up with anything that does have much to do with "Crunch". This is what happens when you name your team after a candy bar. (You probably think this is another one of my jokes. It isn't. Nestlé had a factory in nearby Fulton until very recently, and I believe they may have originally been part owners of the team. It really is named after the candy bar!) To the right you see their first logo, and didn't have anything to do with crunching, either. It was some sort of superhero, or maybe a supervill--

Wait.

Look at that stick.

A solid white hockey stick. You don't see those very often, do you? And yet, look at the hockey stick in the yeti's mouth.

Now look at the gloves in both logos. Blue both times.

Now we know why the "Crunchman" hasn't been seen in years. He had to go into hiding.

Kofi Annan, I beg you to look into this!

Final Score: 67 points.
Penalties: Singular, 6 pts; Cartoon, 17 pts; Irrelevance, 14 pts; Name-logo, 2 pts; Equip-logo (egregious), 8 pts; Colorful, 13 pts; Yucky-Logo, 5 pts; Yucky-Name, 5 pts.
Bonuses: Local, -3 pts.