Mississippi Mud Monsters

131

Oh, god. Teal's back.

For those who may not remember, when Charlotte got an expansion franchise in the NBA back in 1988, they decided to avoid traditional color schemes and instead made the team colors teal and magenta. This set off a trend of teams using those two colors — especially teal — for much of the 90s. In fact, one of the original rules for the Bush League Factor specifically penalized having teal as one of your team colors; it was only as the trend died away that I replaced it with a more general "Colorful" penalty. How bad was it? Well, digging through a folder I have on my computer of old hockey logos turned up roughly thirty examples. The worst offender was the short-lived Southern Hockey League, where over half the league had teal in their logo.

It's not that teal is an awful color — truth be told I kind of like it — but to say it was overdone would be a massive understatement. It had hardly been done before, and then it was damn near everywhere. And then, it largely faded away. Five or ten years ago, most of the teams that were using it were teams that first adopted it in the 90s and had kept the same color scheme since.

But it seems to be coming back.

There have been hints for a few years now. The NHL Seattle Kraken. The ECHL Tahoe Knight Monsters. The Carolina League Lynchburg Hillcats. The Eastern League Chesapeake Baysox. And then this year it's just exploded: I've reviewed four teams so far this season and three have had teal as a team color. (Okay, Modesto is more azure than teal, but close enough.) Slowly but surely this color has been sneaking back on an unsuspecting landscape. I suspect I wasn't supposed to notice this trend quite yet, that they were supposed to be able to get a few more agents in place (the Northeast and Midwest don't seem to have been infiltrated yet, or maybe I missed one) before anyone said anything. But at the same time I'm kicking myself for not noticing sooner. I feel like there I should be alerting some kind of authority to this infiltration. But I'm not sure who. The various leagues? They didn't do anything about it in the 90s so why expect them to do better now? MiLB and the IIHF? They'd probably just get in a pissing match about jurisdiction the way the feds and local police always do on TV shows. I guess it's up to us. I'm not sure what can be done, but hopefully one of you can think of something.

Final Score: 131 points.
Penalties: Region (egregious), 17 pts; Alliteration (egregious), 11 pts; Equipment (doubly-egregious), 42 pts; Humanoid (the eyebrow), 30 pts; Colorful, 31 pts.
Bonuses: None.