Our journey begins by wondering precisely what the hell this team's name really is. The logo, as you can plainly see, says "Grrreenville Grrrowl". But in all official documents, the city is spelled normally, with only one R. This takes the "Misspell" penalty to a whole new level. They haven't simply done like the Fort Wayne Komets or Corpus Christi Rayz and chosen an alternative spelling for their name. They've actually settled on one spelling as their official name, and then spelled it differently on the jerseys. If that isn't egregious, I don't know what is. And they get a second egregious penalty added to that for the run-of-the-mill misspelling of "Growl".

If you look to the right, you'll see the original logo (the current logo is basically just a simplified version of it). This, and not the logo you see above, is the logo that convinced me to take on this project. And while the current logo is bad enough, the old one is even worse. First there's the issue of the dog. That it's cartoony is bad enough. But most teams with cartoony dogs in their logo at least have sense to go with a breed that could inspire a little fear. Most teams, to be precise, go with bulldogs -- the breed of choice for the extant Long Beach Ice Dogs and the defunct Roanoke Express, Atlantic City Boardwalk Bullies, and of course the Hamilton Bulldogs. The Columbia Inferno go with a dalmatian, which isn't quite as impressive, but given the name you can see why they chose that breed instead.

But what is this thing? A Pomeranian? I've met Pomeranians, and they're very sweet dogs...which is the problem. They want you to pet them, and that's about the extent of it. And even if a Pomeranian growls at you, you're not scared. Its jaws won't be big enough to bite you effectively unless you stick your hand in its face, and maybe not even then. The typical Pomeranian probably doesn't even know how to bite you. What do you expect? The average Pomeranian hasn't got two brain cells to rub together. And this one doesn't look like it's any exception. If he was all that clever, I'd expect him to be able to uncross his eyes.

Now that I think about it, those eyes make me wonder if it's a dog at all. Those are human eyes. The whites of a dog's eyes aren't visible at all when he's looking straight ahead -- only when looking to the side. And yes, I am giving the team the "Anthropomorphization" penalty for that one.

Then there's the possible hockey reference. I say "possible" because that thing doesn't really look like a puck. It looks like his dish. He's not threatening you, he's asking to be fed. And with something in his mouth (whatever it is), how can he bare his teeth to even create the pretense of the growl being scary?

The new logo gets rid of that problem, but creates a new one: you can't even see the dog's mouth. I'm used to disembodied heads in logos -- I don't even consider it noteworthy at this point -- but the disembodied top half of a head is another matter. For all we know, someone ripped this poor dog's lower jaw off. Can you still growl with no lower jaw? I suppose it's possible, but it would be kind of pathetic, really.

It suddenly occurs to me that I've been so busy cracking on the logo and the misspelling of "Greenville" that I haven't even gotten to the underlying issue here: Naming a team after a sound effect is just stupid. I will concede that "growl" is one of the better sound effects to name a team after if you're going to name your team after a sound effect, but why not just name the team after the freaking animal that's doing the growling in the first place? They could have been the Grrreenville Grrrizzlies or the Grrreenville Grrreyhounds or even the Grrreenville Grrroundhogs and it would have been better than this name. And it would have forced them to make a better logo.

On the other hand, without this mess, the Bush League Factor might have never come into being. So some good did come out of it. Was the trade-off worth it? The answer, I suspect, depends on how many times you have to look at a Gr(rr)eenville Grrrowl jersey in a typical season.

Final Score: 64 points.
Penalties: Misspell (doubly-egregious), 25 pts; Cartoon, 17 pts; Anthropomorphization, 10 pts; Name-Logo, 2 pts; Yucky-Logo, 5 pts; Yucky-Name, 5 pts.
Bonuses: None.