Macon Mayhem

100

A lot of logos are bad. Some but not all of those bad logos are actually ugly. But this logo goes one step farther: it's an eyesore. I mean that literally: this logo literally makes my eyes hurt if I look at it for too long. I'm not sure, but I think the issue is the two shades of red contrasting with each other, or maybe it's the way the brighter shade of red contrasts with the blue. Whatever it is, I'm having trouble looking at the logo for more than a few seconds at a time.

It's also an ugly logo. I'm not necessarily saying that it's poorly drawn (although it is), I'm saying that there's nothing really attractive about the logo. The grey skin, literally red hair, and blue whatever-the-hell-that-is conspire to make the Viking look like some form of troll. The stick looks like it's made of petrified driftwood. The way the letters are drawn is unappealing. There is simply nothing nice about the logo. I get that this is the point — that the logo is supposed to look representative of chaos in some fashion — but that doesn't help. If I see a picture of Picasso's Guernica, then it's unpleasant, but it's unpleasant because it has something to say about the horrors of war. This is unpleasant because...why? Because the team picked a bad name?

And they did pick a bad name. To be fair, they're at a bit of a disadvantage. Macon was home to two teams named the Macon Whoopee(s), which is arguably both the worst name in the history of minor league hockey and the best name in the history of minor league hockey. Those are big shoes to fill. Macon's most recent entry into minor league hockey, the Macon Trax, utterly failed to fill those shoes. So do the Macon Mayhem. In the case of the Macon Trax, the "Macon"/"Makin'" pun didn't work nearly as well as it did with Macon Whoopee. In this case, I'm not entirely certain they're trying to make a pun out of the city name, and if they are I'm not certain that "making mayhem" actually has an idiomatic meaning the way that "making tracks" and "making whoopee" do. Personally, I think that if a team in Macon can't get permission to use the "Whoopee" name, then it would be best to avoid any attempt to use wordplay in its title. Just go with a generic name the way the Macon Knights (an indoor football team) did, or go with a name related to the actual city the way the Macon Peaches (the name of several baseball teams, the earliest in 1892 and the most recent in 2003) did. But if you're going to go the latter route, pick something other than Macon Peaches; I say that partly because that name clearly belongs to baseball and partly because it's not really any better than Macon Mayhem. But at least the logo for a team called the Macon Peaches wouldn't be such an eyesore.

Final Score: 100 points.
Penalties: Singular, 6 pts; Alliteration, 2 pts; Cartoon, 17 pts; Irrelevance, 14 pts; Name-Logo, 2 pts; Equip-Logo (quintuply egregious), 38 pts; Colorful, 13 pts; Yucky-Logo (egregious), 8 pts.
Bonuses: None.