At least in US sports you don't have sponsor names added to the team names, as we do in some European countries. (The fans don't use them anyway, but journalists somehow feel obliged to.) There's actually a soccer team in the second Austrian league named after an undertaker's who sponsors them.

You mean like the condoms? Kinky.

LF, we have that in NASCAR racing. There is something ugly about all those logos on the jerseys and the cars.

Oh yeah, that's right. And that name has a certain "The Artist Known as Prince" kitsch to it too.



In the same league, at the same time? How's that work? If it were pro wrestling, they'd have a match to see which one got the rights to the name. They should have done that. Call it The Roughrider Bowl.

One other bit I remembered in the Bob & Ray playoff sketch. When he's describing the opening round of the playoffs, he explains that the winner is the one that wins 4 out of 7 games. EXCEPT Minneapolis and Saint Paul, who play 5 out of 9 because they're so close together. Newark and Honolulu only play 3 out of 5 because they're so far apart.

I just had a look at Wikipedia's entry on the short-lived World Football League of 1974, and there were some interesting team names there:

There was one team called the Southern California Sun. That's cute but a bit derivative. Phoenix already had a team called the Suns. Still, I don't remember a team ever being named after just PART of a state before. You've got the California Angels, Minnesota Twins, and Texas Rangers, but SOUTHERN California Sun? So they just left Northnern California out in the cold, so to speak.

I have a similar grip about the various "Texans" teams (Dallas Texans, Houston Texans). Why would you bother to call a team the New York New Yorkers? And there was a Houston Texans team in this league too, but it moved to Shreveport a few games into the season.

Shreveport was Shreveport Steamer. Not SteamerS, mind you, just Steamer. Philadelphia had a team called the Bell, which is equally awkward, but at least makes sense. There are many steamers but just one Liberty Bell. Still, a better name for the Philadelphia team would be the Crack, because THAT'S the part that's really famous.

The Honolulu team was just called The Hawaiians (not the Honolulu Hawaiians). I guess that addresses the gripe I just made, but still the name The Hawaiians sounds more like a wrestling tag team than a football team.

There was a Charlotte Hornets team, same as the NBA Franchise that formed in the mid 80's. Why on earth would you want to name a basketball team after a football team, and one in the WFL, of all places? Does North Carolin value its insect life THAT much? (I guess it would have been politically incorrect to call them the Wasps).

The Chicago team was called the Chicago Fire. There's a name with a good sense of history, though I doubt it's the kind of thing Chicagoans would like to be reminded of. And the Florida team was called the Blazers, so a little redundancy there (though not as bad as the Roughriders kerfuffle). Looks like the name didn't go over well because next season they changed it to the Winds (after their politicians?).

The Detroit team was called the Wheels. Because of the auto industry obviously, but I find that a bit too cutesy.

The Birmingham Americans. That's similar to Ed's gripe about the National League (Aren't they ALL Americans?) Next year, they overcompensated by changing the name to the Vulcans (after Mr. Spock?), almost as if out of spite. ("If you all are going to be Americans too, we won't be American at all!")

nit: Chicago Cubs, Dallas Cowboys and other city named teams are just part of a state.

California really is three geographic regions; Southern, Northern, and Central. At least that's how the natives talk about the state when I visit there.

All right, well I should say an informal part of a state. A city is just part of a state, but it has its own separate government.

Do you remember my plan to move and Dogers back to New York, and give them two more teams, one for each borough? You'd have the Bronx Yankees, the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Queens Mets, the Manhattan Cocktails, and the Staten Island Fairies. One city could have its own division. But sadly, no.

With eighteen CFL games played between only eight teams, there were at least two Roughrider Bowls every year.

Now I'm interested. I'm going to find out where these two teams were located, what their team colours are, their logos, et cetera.

It's also interesting in baseball how a lot of teams used to be named after their socks. (I mean just think of that for a moment. Their SOCKS???) We still have the Red Sox and White Sox (and whose cute idea was it to spell it with an X??).

But the Cubs used to be called the Chicago White Stockings, the Braves used to be the Boston Red Stockings, there's a defunct team called the Saint Louis Brown Stockings, there was a Cincinnati Red Stockings (also defunct). There was a Philadelphia White Stocking team in the old pre-National League National Association. The American Association had a Cincinnati Red Stockings team and a Toledo Blue Stockings. Too bad there was never a Green Stockings team that could have played the Red Stockings in a Christmas Eve Bowl.

Baseball seems to be going for the old fashioned look. The 70's double knit pullovers fashions have given way to older style button down uniforms and styles. A lot of teams have old fashioned looking logos "Such and Such Baseball Club, established 1876", or some such. Even the Houston Astros, a team named after the space program, that used to play in a bubble, and had groundskeepers that wore astronaut jumpsuits, now has this old fashioned look and cursive script. But with all this retro-stuff, nobody has gone so far as to put "Stockings" back in their name.