gosioux76

This is certainly fun, and that french fry/bat secondary is inspired. And the wordmark looks like it's meant to evoke a neon sign. Really, really charming. But that "S" logo, with the burger guy shoehorned into the bottom of the S and the baseball forced into the top, is a big miss.

Let's take it a step further and give this look its day in the sun.

So this is the trend now in independent minor league ball: Create four teams of your own, house them in your stadium, and then launch a single-location circuit. Sort of like a barnstorming tour, but without the barnstorming. The Portland Pickles this week announced something similar with its Gherkins' wood bat club anchoring a four-team circuit that will include the reborn Portland Rosebuds. An independent team out here in the St. Louis area, the O'Fallon Hoots, did something similar last season with a college summer league that included six teams, one being the Hoots, the other with names apparently selected at random, such as the Cavemen and Cornbelters. It's an enterprising way to make use of an otherwise dormant stadium and pull in some new merchandise sales.

But I'm not sure the Texans have managed to "establish the Texans" in their 20 years of existence. The only thing they have going for them in that argument is that they've managed to exist for that long. Its entire look can be defined as inoffensive and uninspiring. Frankly, I see similarities between the Texans today and the Buccaneers in 1997. That team embraced a completely new brand identity after also being around for 20 years with very limited success during that period. The Texans, in my view, don't need to wipe the slate clean with their logo, but this could be an opportunity for them to advance their brand in a way that doesn't alienate its core fan base and energizes an old one. Another corollary is the Chargers: a team that evolved its existing brand by making a permanent link back to its past by embracing its powder blue history. I wouldn't characterize that move as being "stuck in the past." The Titans may be a different franchise than the Oilers, but making a similar move would reconcile its present and future to the city's storied football history. Honestly, I can't even believe that this is a debate. It's so simple.

Spot on about the Texans. They're certainly an oddity -- a fine, consistent uniform that pretty much stirs no excitement at all. Clean, yet forgettable. This is far from an original take, and I'm sure it's been uttered here before, but I'm intrigued by the idea of Houston re-embracing the powder blue/red/white look. The Titans have abandoned it in favor of navy/powder/gray -- the red doesn't even rise to the level of tertiary color. It's there for the taking. Bring back 'Luv ya Blue.

That's a fair point on the helmet logo's repetitiveness. In that case, why have anything on the sleeves? There's not a lot of real estate there as it is. I'd be fine with just leaving it blank and letting the hoops be the star.

Instead of an overhaul, the Panthers could show a vast improvement just by ditching the useless shoulder numbers and making the neckline black. Those shoulder stripes are what make this uniform, and they're one of the last remaining examples of shoulder hoops that are actual hoops. They should embrace that and do whatever they can to not distract from it.

I agree with those of you who said the Panthers don't need a change. They're a rare example of a team that got it right from the jump. I'm not advocating for this, because I don't think they need it, but I've always wanted an NFL team to embrace the helmet style of the USFL's Michigan Panthers -- a more immersive helmet logo that makes it appear as if the Panther is swooping up from the bottom of the helmet. I'd be curious to see what a Carolina adoption of that concept looked like.

I thought the same thing. I'm not sure if metallic yellow and gold are technically the same thing, but that's what it looked like. It was a pretty stark contrast from the more mustardy yellow of the pants. I much preferred the more dull gold helmets of yesteryear.

This is interesting to me. Years ago, didn't it seem like this sleeve treatment would be the wave of the future? It was like the uniform designers' answer to this modern era of mostly sleeveless football jerseys. Yet it never came to be, I presume because not every player chooses to wear a base layer in this way. I feel like it was Oregon State that rolled it out as a concept several years ago.

One of my biggest complaints when my alma mater, University of North Dakota, rebranded to Fighting Hawks several years ago was that they failed to introduce any secondary logos or even any variants on the primary -- which shows a Hawk facing to the right overlaid on an "ND." As a result, the football team used the logo on only one side and put the player's jersey number on the other side of the helmet. It appears the may have rectified that situation, though I'm not sure I love the solution. The football team, which is playing a reduced spring schedule this year, has recently released some clips of its initial practices that show the logo now on both sides of the helmet. They didn't update the logo to have the hawk facing two ways, like the Ravens have done. On the left side of the helmet, the bird is looking backwards. I suppose it's possible that this is temporary, and they'll shift back to numbers on the helmets once the games start. While I don't like that the logo hasn't been modified, the helmet overall looks much better without the numbers on the side.

I'm all in for the Beloit Beef-a-Roo.

My guess? This is a useless publicity stunt that will have proven to be a giant waste of time. In a week or so, they'll come back and say, "we heard your pleas. None of these are as good as Snappers. After an overwhelming response, we've decided to keep the name."

Better yet, replace the SC with STL or the entire acronym, STLCSC. That may be a bit clunky, but I don't know that it would look much different than if they were Roman numerals denoting a year. Maybe that's another option: Don't put letters in that space, but the year established: 2023. Or leave it blank. Anything besides the lonely "SC."

Color that secondary mark and slap it on the jersey.

Absolutely. I can't imagine MLS4TheLou putting the brakes on their unveiling in mid-July because they just saw the branding for a Minneapolis youth club and decide to start over. And you're right on MPLC City -- it's a really interesting organization. Reminds me a lot of nearby neighbor St. Paul Saints and the success they've had in building up an independent brand.

Or they saw these things and liked them so much they decided to just rip them off and hope nobody noticed. UPDATE Alternate theory: this is an expert troll job by Minneapolis City. Based on their Twitter feed, this Futures team branding -- which includes four separate teams with four separate color palettes -- was released in mid-July, at almost the exact same time St. Louis City SC had initially planned their brand launch. (The original event announcement was for July 15, based upon a mobile-site page that has since been updated.) The ownership group in St. Louis have said this brand has been ready to go for months. If that's true, who's to say Minneapolis City isn't a client of one of the 20 designers used by St. Louis, received a glimpse of the St. Louis branding, and thought, "that looks pretty nice for one of our youth sides." Not sure I even believe that scenario. Just pointing out that the timelines here would make it seem more complicated than it otherwise appears to be.

Admittedly overthinking this now, but I wonder if the red strip on the right of the crest might be a tease to an eventual jersey design. I could see a vertical stripe going up the left third of the jersey, over the crest, in much the same way.

Rotated text is in style?

I agree, how they employ yellow will be interesting. They used yellow and the red/magenta color for all of their social media videos in the run-up to the announcement, and I didn't see any issues with it. You can see it on display on the background of the team's Twitter home page. I said it before, I'm not in love with the name. I hate the sideways type on the crest. And I'm genuinely impressed by the colors. But even if the name is a bit pedestrian, and the other elements have flaws, I still applaud the St. Louis group for at least attempting something interesting with the crest and colors. I found the entire Charlotte reveal to be bland and unsurprising, and I'd much rather see a brand take risks, even if they miss.

Watching the livestream, the blue almost looks dark purple next to this shade of red.

Yes, I believe so. And the red appears to be the same magenta/deep pink-ish hue that they've been using in recent social media posts. Except there it was paired with yellow, which I wouldn't be surprised to see appear as a tertiary color.

I love the colors. I love that they found a unique shade of red and blue that's unique to the league and fits in nicely with the city's other sports teams. But that name. OOF. As I've mentioned before, this is a metro area in which the relationships between the city of St. Louis and St. Louis County can be described, at best, as fractious. There have been movements afoot for years to merge the two into one larger government entity. Naming the club "City" strikes me as a little tone deaf locally. There are parts the badge that works. But I'd argue that a design that forces you to place words sideways isn't a good design. Again, as I've said before, I'm a big proponent of badges that don't need words. I'd like to seethe Arch/Rivers iconography inside the badge completed, and what it would look like without the words. I think it would be a thing of beauty.

MLS4THELOU has been using variations on red, yellow and blue since they launched their expansion effort in the fall of 2019. And the stadium renderings show people dressed in red jerseys which, admittedly, isn't always a clue. But I could see how the shade of red they're using here is more pink-ish than what they've been using to this point. I'd be surprised if that's what they went with. It's almost magenta. It would be different for the league, certainly.

Also, @Brian in Boston, your analysis tracks with some of the anecdotes I've heard locally in St. Louis. It's all second or third hand, but the one thing I've heard is that Stars wasn't anybody's first choice, but it was a lot of people's second choices. It's now clear to me that this probably comes directly from these focus groups.