It doesn't end there. Delve into history, and you'll find such teams as the Boston Doves, Brooklyn Robins, and perhaps the strangest of all, the Spokane Canaries.

Why does this happen so much in baseball and hockey...and more interestingly, why doesn't it happen in other sports? The only thing that I can figure out is that since baseball and hockey are both considerably older than football or backetball, they date back to a time when team nicknames were truly that -- nicknames given by fans or reporters, not marketing tools devised by team owners with the help of consultants. When that happens, you're likely to get names that are more colorful. Other nicknames from way back seem to support this -- you get names that teams wouldn't touch today, such as the Victoria Aristocrats, Montreal Shamrocks, Montreal Wanderers, Worchester Ruby Legs, and St. Louis Terriers.

The problem with this idea is that football isn't much younger than hockey -- the NFL was founded in 1920, less than twenty years after the first professional hockey league. Early football teams had names that fit into this pattern -- the Cardinals are a charter team, and other odd names from the NFL's first decade include the Dayton Triangles, Evansville Crimson Giants, Providence Steam Roller, and Brooklyn Horsemen. For some reason this tradition didn't stick in football like it did in hockey and baseball. Since a lot of the early NFL teams folded long ago -- as early as 1940 only five teams dating from before 1930 remained, and football never had much in the way of minor leagues to add to traditions the way baseball and hockey did -- football's team names are more modern in style than baseball and hockey. Basketball also lacks the minor leagues, and the NBA only dates back to 1946, so it's easy to see why its nicknames have a modern feel as well.

But this is all just theorizing on my part. If you have any ideas on the subject, be they competing theories or evidence to support or undermine mine, I'd love to hear it.

Now, let's move onto the Gulls logo. It's a decent logo, but look to the right and ask yourself if it wouldn't be just a little better without that hockey stick. I think it would. Before you add that, what you have is a reasonably stylized drawing of a gull, the team name (never necessary but rarely an actual design mistake), and a basic triangle as a background element.

Add the stick, and suddenly the gull looks cartoony (although I was generous and didn't actually give them that penalty), and the logo doesn't look as balanced as it did before. Worse yet, while the gull's head is drawn reasonably well, the stick is drawn clumsily. It's too angular, and worse yet the angle is wrong. Simply put, the stick screws everything up.

And, by my count, it is literally the source of every point the logo has. Seriously. This logo would have zero points if the stick and the arm holding it weren't there.

Final Score: 15 points.
Penalties: Anthropomorphization, 10 pts; Equip-logo, 5 pts.
Bonuses: None.