rayonsports.com

The 2014 NFL season begins tonight with a match between the Green Bay Packers and defending Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks. Today’s featured team logo is of a previous pro football team from the Emerald City, the Seattle Rangers of the old Continental Football League. The league began play in 1965 to compete with the NFL, and Seattle joined it in 1967 when a “Western Division” was added. The Rangers were one of the first pro teams to play their games on artificial turf, which was installed in Seattle’s Memorial Stadium in the late ’60s.

This is the current logo of the Buffalo Bills football team, which is definitely a classic since it has been used since 1974, a year after the team moved into its’ “new” stadium in 1973. Designed by aerospace designer Stephens Wright, the new “charging buffalo” logo was supposed to signify a dynamic franchise moving forward, as opposed to the stationary, standing red bison used earlier.

This logo proved to be very difficult to find. It’s the original logo from the 1960s of the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. After a lengthy search online, the only picture of this original logo that I could find is this one, cropped from the cardboard box of an old electric football game sold in the ’60s, and now available as a collector’s item on Ebay.

Although not technically a team logo, this is the logo of the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. This year, Ray Guy became the first punter inducted into the Hall, and as he noted in his induction speech, for the first time the Hall has a complete “team”, so the timing to post this logo is just right. The Hall opened in 1963, when it inducted 17 charter members, and celebrated its’ 50th Anniversary last year. The football Hall is unique among sports halls of fame in that it has never included game officials among its’ inductees.

Logo of a former Arena Football League team, the Houston Thunderbears. The franchise existed from 1996 until 2001, starting out as the Texas Terror before changing names to the Thunderbears in 1998. The team was never a success, on the field or attendance-wise, and its’ owner, Leslie Alexander (who also owned the NBA Rockets) threw in the towel and sold the club back to the Arena League in 2001. They disbanded, along with three other teams, a year later.

Logo of a former minor league baseball team, the Piedmont Boll Weevils, who played in the South Atlantic League from 1996 until 2000. Players who spent part of their minor league careers with the Weevils include Marlon Byrd, Jimmy Rollins, Brett Myers and football player Rickey Williams, who played for the team in the late 1990s while also playing college football at Texas.

Logo of a current National Basketball Association team, the New Orleans Pelicans. This franchise started out in 1988 in Charlotte as the Hornets, but relocated to New Orleans in 2002, keeping the “Hornets” nickname until this past season, when the name was changed to honor both the state bird – the Brown Pelican – and the history of a minor league baseball team that used that name from 1901 until 1957. The team’s current owner is Tom Benson, who also owns the NFL’s New Orleans Saints.

Logo of a professional hockey team that began in the old World Hockey Association, the Quebec Nordiques. The Nordiques played in the WHA until the league merged with the NHL, when they joined the established league, which set up a natural rivalry with the storied Montreal Canadiens. This logo was used during the team’s WHA years, from 1972 until 1979. The franchise had been awarded to San Francisco and was to be named the San Francisco Sharks, but the ownership group collapsed prior to playing a game and the team was relocated to Quebec City.

This isn’t a “team” logo, but with the NFL draft just concluded, I thought it would be interesting to feature a logo that I was surprised even existed – a logo for the 1995 expansion draft that stocked the two teams entering the league that year, the Carolina Panthers and Jacksonville Jaguars. Unlike in prior expansions, the league was generous with the new clubs in dispersing players from the existing teams, and also gave the two new teams the first two picks in the college draft. The generosity was mainly due to the huge “entry fees” the new cities paid to join the NFL. Both the Panthers and Jaguars parlayed the generosity into early success, as both qualified for their conference’s championship game by their third season.

Logo of the National Basketball Association’s Portland Trailblazers, a franchise that came into existence when the league expanded in 1970. This logo was used from 1970 until 1990. The club won the NBA championship in 1977, under the direction of Hall of Fame coach Jack Ramsay, and led by star players like Bill Walton, Maurice Lucas and Lionel Hollins. Four Blazer players have been named Rookie of The Year over the years, and six former players are in the Hall of Fame, including Walton, Clyde Drexler, Scottie Pippen and Lenny Wilkens, who also coached the team at one point.