gosioux76

Spotted in the parking lot of a southern Indiana amusement park: A car with a Connecticut license plate commemorating the Hartford Whalers.

I guess I don’t see what many of you are seeing with the Vikings throwbacks. They’re fine, but they feel like a Halloween costume, a team playing 1970s dress-up. I’m generally the type to prefer throwbacks over the modern look. Seattle, for example, should absolutely ditch the drab navy for the much more vibrant throwbacks. But the Vikings are one of the few franchises that succeeded in blending classic with modern, which should be the goal in any new uniform design. This should be celebrated. My suspicion is that any suggestion to replace the current look is more about wanting change for change’s sake than actually preferring an inferior (though still very nice) set to what they have now.

I like the Vikings throwbacks, but I can’t help but think they feel a little heavier on yellow than the originals. It might have something to do with the more compressed jersey cuts of today.

I remember it vividly, yet I still don't care that they're associated with terrible teams. (They're also associated with a very good team that made it to the NFC Championship game in the franchise's third season, but that's treated, perhaps justifiably, as an anomaly.) A good-looking uniform is still a good-looking uniform. The Bucs are the rare franchise to have had a top-notch visual identity for most of its history (I'm intentionally omitting the short-lived alarm clock era, which most people despise), so I'm not suggesting these are better or worse than the uniforms they wore during their Super Bowl victories. I'm just pointing out that, if they were to switch to these full time, I'd be perfectly fine with it. They're gorgeous uniforms, no matter what Vinny Testaverde did in them in 1989.

Good lord, those Buccaneers uniforms are gorgeous.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't see the Arena Football League as something with such rich history that its success or failure depends on keeping some of its old teams. Certainly, I recognize the Arizona Rattlers, San Jose SabreCats and Philadelphia Soul as being some of the league's franchises, but so many have come and gone over time with the league's various iterations that starting from scratch really seems inconsequential to me.

It comes down to trademark ownership. A look through the USPTO's TESS database shows that NFL Properties has owned the Canton Bulldogs trademark since 2006. This is the primary reason why the new USFL is sticking to the names of the original USFL; it already holds the trademarks to those brands.

Interesting detail in The Athletic's story. A big unanswered question for the USL is how they'd handle meeting the U.S. Soccer Federation's Professional League Standards, which set a baseline for inclusion in pro leagues, such as market size, the wealth of a club's owner and stadium size. Would, for example, the team in Greenville, South Carolina, which plays at Furman University's football stadium and is owned by the founder of a local advertising firm, meet the USSF standards to join the Championship if the club won promotion? It'll be interesting to see how they work this out.

This would be a brilliant move for USL. The gap between Championship and Leagues 1 and 2, at least in terms of stadium infrastructure, isn't so vast that a lower league team would stand out in the higher divisions. Can't say the same thing for the gap between Championship and MLS. While this might make the USL more intriguing for casual fans, I wouldn't harbor any notion that it would make it competitive with MLS. It's apples to oranges, in terms of the quality of the players, what they're paid and the standard of stadium infrastructure. It's like putting a AA baseball team with one of those quaint stadiums that allows fans to lounge on the grass behind the outfield fence in the majors for a season. That's not to say that the USL can't grow and edge closer to MLS. But a lot of capital would have to be invested in the next 10 to 20 years for it to get even close to that standard.

These are great. I think it would be cool if you found a way to incorporate the original Showboats wheel logo as a tertiary mark, either on the collar or maybe on the hips. The heavy use of gray on the Maulers really helps, but I'd listen to that voice in your head and bring back the purple and orange. As much as I like the gray, this still feels like Steelers cosplay.

I understand this point. And it's a good one. But at the same time, so much of sports is rooted in nostalgia that it makes perfect sense for teams to evolve while taking nods to their visual history. For example, I'm a lifelong Timberwolves fan who think their current look — a significant creative departure from the past — is the most bland and lifeless the team has ever looked. But their 2021-22 City Edition uniform, which incorporated small touches from all their prior looks, might be one of my favorite Wolves uniforms ever. That set needed some editing, but I'd love nothing more for the Timberwolves to come up with something new that draws some of its lineage to the looks of the past, whether it be by returning to kelly green and royal blue or modernizing a prior wordmark. It's a different sports, obviously, but I think what the Twins did this year did a great job of threading the needle between giving the team a new direction while maintaining links to the past. If there's a design strategy to follow, I hope it's that one.

This is a really strange point to argue. It's not a hard concept. The City Connect program allows teams to create uniforms bearing attributes or inspired by the culture of their local markets, and they've been given pretty wide latitude in how they do this. They're not required to follow the same formula. The teams have chosen to interpret the idea in different ways. Miami, as most people know, is heavily influenced by Cuba and Cuban culture. So they chose to pay homage to a Cuban team whose influence still resonates with the Cubans living in Miami. From that explanation, if you can't understand what it has to do with Miami, then I'm not sure anybody can help.

I don't know man, I'm not a fan of the dazzle fabric either, but I'm not in a hurry for anybody to explain why they might be. Some people like them, others don't. I'm not sure why that would prompt you to call the so-called "shiny pants complainers" ignorant.

I'd like him better if he changed his name to Joey Hotdogs.

As someone who's never quite understood the appeal of NASCAR, I found this to be really insightful. It seems pretty clear the Chicago road race was a fail for NASCAR, but I believe posts like this help explain why they're pushing to expand the appeal. As much as some of you might want NASCAR to stick to what it's good at, what was once America's fastest-growing sport feels like it's regressing. Recognizing that, it makes sense to try to latch onto to some of the appeal of F1 — which, with Netflix's help, has succeeded in attracting non-motorsports fans like myself onto racing. You can criticize the results, but I can 't really blame NASCAR for trying. I've never had interest in a NASCAR race, but this Chicago race -- as gimmicky as it may be -- at least caught my attention, now that I'm fully indoctrinated into the F1 universe. I'm sure NASCAR was hoping they could catch more audience in F1's slipstream.

I agree with this. This debate isn't as much about the marathon as it is about the City Connect program in general. The Boston City Connect uniform probably adheres to the spirit of the program better than any others in the set. I can absolutely see the value of wearing that uniform for games played on the day of the race. It's a nice bow on top of the city's celebration of the event. But that's it. I don't want to see it all season long. Make it a one-day thing.

What would the motivation be in USL taking on MLS directly? It used to be that such moves were designed to force the established leagues to expand via merger, a la the AFL, ABA and WHL models. But I can't imagine that as a logical outcome in the case of MLS, which is in perpetual expansion mode. Simply merging and adding USL franchises to the league would mean leaving billions on the table.

I think it looks good. I just don't think it looks like a Red Sox uniform.

A bit of a tangent here, but it will never cease to amaze me that the Kansas City-Omaha Kings were once a thing. One NBA team shared by two cities 180 miles apart.

Someday they'll find a cure for this disease.

This makes sense for the purposes of brand preservation, but if I'm a billionaire who just bought a team, I'm going to name it whatever the hell I'd want to name it, and I don't think the league would stand in the way of a reasonable alternative.

It's pretty bad.

I worked in downtown Portland but lived in Aloha, kind of at the midway point between Nike HQ and Intel's Hillsboro campus.

Jan 5, 2022, Bloomberg Law: Washington NFL Team Punts on RedWolves Citing Trademark Issues It doesn't say anything specific about Arkansas State, but quotes an IP lawyer working with the team as saying trademark issues kept them from considering any Wolves name.

Man, as a longtime (former) Oregon resident, you've just absolutely nailed this whole project. Stunning work.