New Orleans Pelicans Arrive

I think I like the fake one I posted a while back somewhat better, but it's nice to see some new blood in the nickname universe. Imagine next year, when the Kings no longer exist, the Sonics are back in Seattle, the Hornets are back where they belong in Charlotte, and the Pelicans will be playing in New Orleans.

Here's the new primary:

And here's a set of the new collection, primary and secondaries:

The bird-de-lis is kinda silly, but it grows on you if you have fond feelings for New Orleans and her teams.

Colorful Breakdown of a "Mothership Flag"

My dad sent this flag picture over to me, and I thought it looked cool. It has six other flags shown using just rectangles, which is pretty informative:

I think I've featured each one of the seven of these flags on this blob before, so seeing them all together is right up my alley.

College Football Helmet Study

I'll be covering a few different things here.

Colleges Using Professional Designs

Colleges and high schools use professional helmet designs often, and usually without repercussions. This is mainly for two reasons: the first is that these schools are typically community colleges where football isn't an identity builder. I live in Southern California, and college football down here is USC first, then UCLA. Nobody really identifies their college football identity down here with Cerritos College, a local community college in Cerritos, a town on the border of the counties of LA and Orange. USC and UCLA have easily identifiable helmets and logos, things that they can sell. That's the second reason from above: selling the image for money. Here's Cerritos College's helmet:

This is the old Atlanta Falcons logo. They've moved on to a sleeker, italicized version. This, along with the Eagles wings, Rams horns, and even Vikings horns (as we'll see in a moment) are used with great regularity at the high school and community college level. Basically, this isn't bizarre.

These next few are helmets that use a little more specific and singular logos from the NFL. I think these all may have been changed since they used them, but it's still pretty cool to see them.

The first is from Kentucky State:

They're using the Denver Broncos current horse-head in gold/yellow over green. Yikes.

Next is a close-to-me Orange Coast College, who may have abandoned football altogether (I'll have to get back to you on that):

They use the Tampa Bay Buccaneers flag logo. I do like the use of the navy instead of whatever color the pro team uses as their field--gray, right?

Next is tiny Lewis and Clark from Washing State:

They're using the Patriots guy over orange. Okay...they've since changed the helmet, and then I think they abandoned the football program (not so sure...).

Local Long Beach Gear

This next team uses the Vikings horns, but that's not too out of the ordinary. This team plays Cerritos, which itself is pretty much local for us here in Long Beach. They use a black field instead of Minnesota's purple, Long Beach City College:

Now, we do have a state university here, Long Beach State (CSULB), but they abandoned football in the '90s. Two of their helmets are visible here. The first shows when they still used brown and gold as their color scheme, before switching to black and gold:

Here's another with the brown and gold, but here they're using the team's nickname, the 49ers. Oddly enough, their named not for the gold-miners of the 1849 gold rush, but for the 1949 founding year of the university. Seriously.

Now, that word font and logo is still used by the track team and the volleyball teams, while the newer "the Beach" and the interlocking "LB" are preferred by the higher profile basketball teams. 

To round out a decidedly non-local but mostly relevant discussion, here's a gold helmet with "49ers" on it that does have to do with the gold rush, just not the NFL:

That's the Yuba City College 49ers for you.

1979 Cursive Interstate Rivals

This may seem like a contrived category, but it started when I remembered that Pitt used to use a script writing as their logo, back when Dan Marino went there. Then I noticed that a few other changes had been made, and 1979 seems like a year when these four teams used these four logos. Also, 1979 was the year I was born, which has its own significance for me.

The first is for the state of Pennsylvania, and the rivals are Pitt:

And Pennsylvania University:

The two main Pennsylvania cities are Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, but as far as four letter abbreviations for their main universities? Pitt and Penn. I guess, in reality, that would be Pitt and Penn St, which is a different school from Penn and has had far more success on the football field than Penn. It just doesn't work for this post.

Next state is California, and here we get  the NorCal and SoCal rivalry with UCLA:

And Cal Berkeley:

Today the script UCLA is thicker, and the color scheme for Cal has flip-flopped, but they're otherwise pretty similar. How many schools have done what UCLA has with their logo, the upper-to-lower casing of their normally all upper-case letters? I haven't seen and "Unlv" or "Utep" word mark logos out there.

Panther Studies

I posted a while back about the Carolina Panthers, and how I found a graphic that compared their first and second (very new) logos. I mentioned the USFL Panthers logo as maybe being an inspiration.

Then, later, I found the following Sacramento City College helmet, and had a flashback:

Luckily, my source site had both, and I was able to go back and find the USFL Panthers and compared the two (just for you, my fine readers):

The Awesome and Not-So-Much from the Nerd Colleges

Firs, the Awesome. Below is a local college type city, Claremont, CA. In Claremont are what are known as "the Claremont Colleges". Among others are Scripps, Pitzer, Claremont Mckenna, and my favorite of the bunch, Harvey Mudd.

Harvey Mudd is one of America's top two in Math. It's usually ahead of MIT and behind CalTech. Go Harvey Mudd!

I think they may have stopped playing football, but, again, I'm not sure. What I am sure of, though, is that I haven't seen a helmet idea as cool as this: buck antlers:

And here's MIT's erstwhile football team, the owls or the engineers or something else:

How Many French Were in Kansas?

The following helmet is for Saint Mary of the Plains, a small school in Kansas, and the use of the fleur de lis leads me to believe that there was a French flavor to the founders:

I thought it looked pretty cool, but I like the use of the fleur de lis.

Finally, My Alma Mater

Cal Poly SLO, baby! Go Ramses Barden! Go Asa Jackson, I'll be rooting for you a little in the Super Bowl!

Texas City Flags

What's the nickname of the state of Texas? Having lived there, I know it's known as the Lone Star state. Of course, you don't need to live there to know that or have learned that.

The five pointed "nautical" star, though, is the symbol for Texas, and studies have shown that by putting either the star or the outline of the state on products you're trying to sell will increase sales by a definite percentage. The Dallas Cowboys logo is the star. One of the original flags, the Burnet Flag, is a solid blue field with a single large white star (it was showcased here a while ago).

So, is it surprising that the three largest cities in Texas use some form of the single, five-pointed star as the dominant image of their city-local flags?

What are the three largest cities?

1. Houston, with a variation of the Burnet Flag:

2. San Antonio, which centers the Alamo in their star, with the field split between red and blue:

3. Dallas, with multiple stars within the star within the city seal within the star, and a horizontal splitting of the red and blue:

To clarify, San Antonio is bigger than Dallas, but not bigger than the Dallas/Ft. Worth metro area. Ft. Worth has its own flag and population though, so I stand by my post.

Miami Dolphins Finally Change it Up

The Miami Dolphins have finally decided to change their helmet design, the first major upgrade in their team's history. They did move the head of their dancing dolphin out of the circle, but is that really major?

Here's their proposed new helmet design, and while it isn't as cool as the experimental one I posted about a few posts ago, it's pretty cool on its own:

It's both dynamic and classic, it doesn't deviate too much from what they already have, and if the announcement was fake, then fans of logo design wouldn't be put out too much. It almost makes me wish I cared about the Dolphins.

Bulgaria and Hungary: Decemberween Colors

I wrote an amalgamation post a while back about different flags and how they're similar to great degrees, things like two island nations from the Caribbean and the major European vertical tri-bands.

During all that hub-bub (if you care to call it that), I lost track of two horizontal tribanded flags that use the same colors: red, white and green.

I have one friend who is half Bulgar, and a different friend who is half Magyar. According to the history books, the Hungarian flag dates back further than the Bulgarian flag, but that's likely do to the fact that the Magyars, while the last ethnic group to settle in Europe proper, were established as their own kingdom before the Bulgars were able to break away from one of the many other Altaic overlords where Eastern Europe meets the Asian Steppe.

First, here is the Bulgarian flag (and a shout out to Diana Mircheva):

And here's the Hungarian flag (and a shout out to a former roommate and full time Magyar, Jimmy Berlow):

There's no real relation that we can tell right away between the colors, besides those colors being used by many groups for many reasons through the years.

Nice Jerseys from Ebbets Field Flannels

Ebbets Field Flannels is a baseball (mostly) jersey making company who specializes in old-school accuracy, and this attention to detail is seen in their pricing. They have so many teams that I'd either never heard of or had heard of but hadn't really ever seen the jersey. Whatever. If you like jerseys, or at least at looking at jerseys, you'd love this site.

Here we see the only integrated team in the Southern Association (for a long time), the Atlanta Crackers. The name sounds funny, but it implies wheat cracking, and there have been plenty of teams nicknamed Crackers or Black Crackers.

Compare the color scheme and script writing to the current day Atlanta Braves team, the team that in 1965 put the final kibosh on the Crackers minor league team:

I like this jersey, but it isn't so old. It's from a Japanese team that has since changed their name. I like the Astro Boy patch on the left arm:

The solid blue is what drew me to this Indianapolis Clowns jersey. Well, that and #5 was the Hammer's number. The Clowns were like the Harlem Globetrotters: a barnstorming team that traveled and played communities' best teams, usually winning. They were a Negro League team during the death gasps of the various organized leagues known today as "the Negro Leagues." They survived a few years past the integration of the Major Leagues, into the fifties. It was during that time that a teenage Hank Aaron played, and this is what he wore (Hank's currently my favorite living old-timey player):

The idea that you could "Commies" on your jersey makes me laugh. This was a team from the 1920's that were known as the Commodores:

Here's my Seals collection. The San Francisco Seals were one of the two SF teams in the old PCL (along with the Mission Reds) and one of my favorite old designs. I identify with the old teams from the Bay Area, and the Seals had a few things going for them: pinstripes and Joe DiMaggio. These pictures show the various things that Ebbets Field Flannels do: caps, jerseys, jackets, and T-shirts. (I guess this entire post is basically a commercial for their site.)

The caps vary in years, and of these two, I prefer the second, the dark navy and white only:

Here's the jersey with the script. Out of all the Seals jerseys they have on their site, which is many, this is my favorite:

They make jackets and coats as well. I've been eyeing this one for a while. It makes the best sense considering our weather here (in Southern California) and how it's light wool with button fasteners:

The last thing I have here is a nice shirt from an old PCL team from my Home City:

I didn't intend to advertise for EFF when I started this post. It just happened like that. These were some jerseys and shirts I'd been sitting on, forgetting why I snatched up the pictures in the first place.

I imagine I might use a jersey from their site again, or from time to time, just to illustrate a specific point. That's why I had the in the first place...I just forgot the reason why.

Whatever.

I respect quality, and what they--Ebbets Field Flannels--do is quality.

Iroquois Nation

When Benjamin Franklin was on the council to come up with an American style Magna Carta, a set of rules by which to be governed, what turned out to be the Articles of Confederation, the forerunner to our  Constitution, he didn't have to look to far.

The Five Nations, also known as the Iroquois Confederacy, were nearby and had just such a document. In fact, Franklin cribbed the juiciest parts for the Articles of Confed., and the Constitution retains the structure and pattern. The Constitution is more "American" than we ever knew.

Here's a the Iroquois Nation's current flag, a pretty classic design:

The Iroquois Confederacy competes in lacrosse as a nation, and is respectfully ranked.