The World I Grew Up In is Gone

by JA, The Feed

Ending the reliance on criminally inclined players isn't the only change that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has in mind for the league. He's also got some bones to pick with the organization's logo. Mere months after the commish called the shield the "envy of the sports world" the league announced that they would be instituting a new one in April 2008. You can see it on right. They didn't make too many drastic changes and even the kids who love eating paste the most would be able to solve the "what's different in this picture" puzzle in an issue of Highlights.

The most notable change is the shift from 25 stars at the top to eight on the new version. Each star represents one of the league's eight divisions, I presume that it's AFC East in the top left and NFC West in the bottom right but they weren't specific. That does give the stars more relevance than in the previous version. We all know that the 13 stripes on the American flag are for good luck but the reason for the 25 stars eluded even the savviest of football observers. Because it didn't exist. NFL executives couldn't find any rationale behind the stars although I think it's because that's how many stars fit in the space and, really, who doesn't like to look at as many stars as possible. From 1960-1969 the logo featured just 22 stars and some jaunty pinstripes, although the reasons for each of those has also been lost to the sands of time.

You can also see that there's a change with the football that anchors the sea of stars. The previous version looks kind of like a rear view of a clamshell, no doubt in honor of Clamshell Parsons, the first 1,000 yard rusher in the history of the league. Like so many other football heroes, Clamshell ran afoul of the law when he made it rain during a USO dance in 1943 causing a riot when one of the women displayed her petticoat. Scandalous stuff that infuriated Goodell to no end. Anyway, the new ball looks more like an actual football and erases the memory of Clamshell from the league once and for all.

There's also a pretty big difference in the L at the NFL. The old version was regularly mistaken for a lower case B which caused all kinds of trademark infringement problems for the league. One walk through Hong Kong would find all kinds of NFb merchandise being sold and the league was powerless to stop it because of their attempt to get overly stylish on the Shield. The new L is an unassailable one and will finally put an end to any unfavorable comparisons with the National Football Bureau that briefly challenged for superiority in the early 70's.

The league believes that the new logo will show up better on "third screens" like PDAs and cellphones. Why the league believes that many of their fans spend their time looking at the league's logo on their PDAs and cellphones is beyond my feeble brain but more power to them for looking out for that odd constituency.