Roanoke Rail Yard Dawgs

76

The loud noise you may have just heard was the thud made when I looked at this name and logo and my jaw dropped so far it hit the desk.

The second loud noise you may have heard was the thud when, after picking my jaw back up, I facepalmed so hard I gave myself a concussion.

If, sometime in the next several minutes, you hear a rapid series of loud noises, those will be the sound of me repeatedly banging my head against the desk in the hopes that I will knock myself unconscious and wake up with amnesia, having forgotten that this team ever existed.

What I'm trying to convey here is that the only thing more dreadful than this team's logo is its name.

Rail Yard Dawgs. How many problems are there with that three word phrase? Well, there's the fact that the expression is "junkyard dog", not "rail yard dog". They changed it to "rail yard dog" to give the name a tie-in to Roanoke's history as a railroad hub. Two problems there. First of all, the change from "junkyard dog" to "rail yard dog" is grasping at straws. Second, you wouldn't want to have a dog at your rail yard if you could help it. At best, the dog would constantly being interfering with the operations of the rail yard and costing the owner lots of money. At worst, it would get run over in a matter of minutes. I'm fairly certain this is not the image the team wants to convey.

Then there's the ridiculous spelling of "dog" as "dawg". By itself it might not be so bad, but on top of the whole "rail yard dog" concept it's the whipped cream on top of a hot turd sundae.

The alliteration of "Roanoke" and "Rail Yard Dawgs" is the cherry.

And then there's the logo. I don't know if you've noticed, but from what I can tell teams have in recent years been moving away from cartoony, ludicrously aggressive looking animals in logos. That makes this logo a throwback, and not in a good way. It's also just way too damn busy. You've got a striped hat and striped overalls, a bandana with stars on it, and a ring formed by railroad tracks. Any one of these by itself would be problematic, but with all three of them the logo is simply an eyesore.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go bang my head against the desk repeatedly and hopefully forget this team ever existed.

Final Score: 76 points.
Penalties: Misspell, 11 pts; Compound, 13 pts; Wordplay, 7 pts; Alliteration, 2 pts; Cartoon, 17 pts; Anthropomorphization, 10 pts; Name-Logo, 2 pts; Equip-Logo (egregious), 8 pts; Yucky-Name, 4 pts; Yucky-Logo, 5 pts
Bonuses: Local, -3 pts.