With the offseason in full swing, let’s have a look at the designs of all 32 of the NFL’s team logos, ranked from worst to best.
Every NFL team has a logo, but only some of them stand out, whether for good or bad reasons. Logos are symbols meant to represent not only the mascots of teams, but the cities they play in and the fans who support them. With OTAs just getting underway, we’re still nearly three months away from football, so let’s rank all of the NFL’s team logos from one to 32!
Obviously, this is for fun and these rankings are mine alone. Logos that have simple, replicable designs with attractive color schemes are favored, and those that pay homage to their homes and local cultures receive especially high marks.
Some of these logos have interesting backstories and many have gone through multiple revisions, but they all mean something to the fans who wear them every day. Here they are, starting from the bottom, the NFL’s best and worst logos.
The fact that the nation’s capitol is represented by a team whose nickname is a word that no sensitive person would use in describing a person of Native American descent is despicable. Dan Snyder has insisted that his team will “NEVER” change its name, but until it does, Washington’s football team remains at the bottom of this list.
Lost in the forest of Washington’s moniker is the “Chiefs.” While the team’s name is not directly derogatory in the way that Washington’s team name is and the team is at least aware of the name’s potential for offense, the appropriation of Native American imagery for a mascot for a sports team is still troubling.
Aside from that, the logo itself is a jaggedy-edged arrowhead with “KC” written inside and looks like something a second-grader drew. The wordmark is outdated, the color scheme is more bland than anything else and the team look is still pretty drab overall. Kansas City is due for an upgrade.
The Cincinnati Zoo is one of the finest zoos in the world and probably the only place in Cincinnati that has ever seen an actual Bengal tiger. Paul Brown apparently wanted to name the team after the defunct team of the same name that played in Cincinnati from 1938-1941, but even then the nickname makes little sense.
The logo is just an orange letter “B” with stripes, despite the fact that the Bengals had a pretty cool leaping tiger logo for a while. The color scheme might actually a knockoff of the Cleveland Browns, as Brown has been said to have owned the Browns’ equipment when he was fired from Cleveland in 1968 and simply moved it all to Cincinnati when he took the head coaching job there. Everything about the Bengals’ branding is a hand-me-down or just boring.
The “Jets” is a good name for a football team, especially one from New York. But instead of the logo being, you know, a jet, it’s an oval shield with the word “Jets” overlaying the letters “NY,” which is entirely uninteresting and kind of disappointing.
The Packers’ nickname is a nod to local industry, which is a nice touch, especially considering the close ties the Packers have to their community, but oh, that color scheme. Green and gold do not go together, and because of that, the Packers’ logo was always going to look ridiculous.
The logo itself is just boring. Lombardi commissioned an equipment manager to come up with something in 1961 and the “oval G” was the proposal. The wordmark is just a stencil. Overall, it’s mostly uncreative and bathed in a hideous green and gold glow.
The Giants took their name from the local baseball team and their logo is just a couple of blue lowercase letters, all of which is kind of boring and unoriginal.
The Falcons’ logo is a little weird. It’s the most indistinguishable of the NFL’s flock of bird mascots and only sort of looks like a bird at all. I think it’s the claw that’s throwing me off. Apparently, it is supposed to look like the letter “F,” presumably to help us understand that it is, in fact, a falcon and not some other generic North American bird of prey.
The red and black color scheme has a kind of brooding light novel protagonist vibe and sort of looks like the colors someone would pick for their created team in Madden, and not in a good way.
This list isn’t specifically about uniforms, but, man, those uniforms look like the offspring of the XFL and an alarm clock. Please, Tampa, bring back the creamsicles. They were amazing.
The Buccaneers’ logo mostly just lacks creativity. When they moved away from the hilarious yet endearing Bucco Bruce to a skull and crossed swords, the logo was a bit generic but suitable. The recent update, however, with the brighter red and oddly-cartoonish skull, looks more like something out of “Jake and the Never Land Pirates.” Good for a birthday party, not so good for a professional football team.
Is it a pirate? Is it a football player? Is it a metal man? Whatever it is, Oakland felt the need to print the word “RAIDERS” across the top of their logo in big, bold letters just to make sure you knew what it was, which was apparently almost “Señors.”
Apparently, the logo is designed after Randolph Scott, an actor who appeared in a bunch of westerns in the ’40s and ’50s and was once the country’s seventh most-popular actor. Neat.
Black and white have become iconically Raiders colors, I guess, but the logo itself, complete with unbuckled chinstrap, is pretty weird if you look at it. Of course, it can’t look back at you because the unpatched eye is closed for some reason.
Fun fact: the Bills’ uniforms were originally based on the Detroit Lions’ colors. Owner Ralph Wilson had held partial ownership of the Lions at one point and Buffalo’s first uniforms when they joined the AFL in 1960 might have actually been old Detroit jerseys.
The team is legitimately named after “Buffalo Bill” Cody, a man born in Iowa whose show depicted the wild west and had nothing to do western New York, except that his show apparently visited 22 times over 43 years, roughly the same number of times it visited Albany.
The name was adopted because the previous Buffalo football franchise, since defunct, had adopted the name as a part of an advertising gimmick for Frontier Oil Company.
The Bills’ logo is a bison, which is what Cody was famous for hunting and apparently not even a buffalo at all. The silhouetted bison appears in other places in American culture, including the Wyoming state flag, but seeing as how it’s quite possible that bison never roamed in the area of the modern city known as “Buffalo,” the nickname seems out of place geographically. The logo itself, while less anatomically correct these days, is still mostly a blob with a stripe and is mostly uninteresting.
The name “49ers” is cool because it refers to the 1849 Gold Rush, which is an important part of California’s history. The logo itself is another “letters in an oval” design, though, and the color scheme and extra border don’t make it much better than the others.
A pickaxe or something that hearkened to the Gold Rush would have been welcome, although it’s probably a good thing that they moved away from this guy, who is either dying of dysentery or, as some have suggested, propelling himself into the sky by farting.
Richard Wagner gave Vikings horns and somehow this historical detail found its way onto Minnesota professional football helmets. The name was chosen because of the large number of Minnesotans with Scandinavian heritage.
The logo is a profile of a blond Viking man, complete with horned helmet, and it’s a bit complex. There are a lot of lines and there’s nothing particularly interesting about the person himself. The entire design is based around the oversized horns, which is a creative design element as it also appears on the helmet, but that’s about it.
The Bears’ logo is the same “wishbone ‘C’” that they’ve had for decades, which would be fine, but their alternate logo is just a bear’s face that looks like it’s yawning. The orange and navy color scheme is a little weird but it usually works. However, while the “C” is okay because it’s kind of classic, the other logo just drags down the team’s overall look.
A charger is a war horse, but you wouldn’t know that by looking at the Chargers’ logo. Instead of a freaking charging war horse, Los Angeles’ second football team is more closely connected to the device you use to keep your iPhone going.
The lightning bolt is okay for a helmet design, but it mostly falls short as a primary logo because it is not what it could be. Yes, the Broncos are in the same division, but in a league with five different birds and four different cats represented, there’s room for a powder blue stallion.
But hey, at least it’s not a refurbished Dodgers logo.
Originally, the name “Colts” referred to the horse breeding and racing culture of Baltimore, which is pretty cool, albeit lost in the move to Indianapolis. The blue horseshoe is serviceable, but pretty generic and not terribly interesting on any level, especially when horses make cool logos and only one other team in the league is using its horse imagery. See: Chargers, Los Angeles.
The name “Ravens” comes from the Edgar Allen Poe poem, as Poe lived in Baltimore when he wrote it. The colors are cool and the raven is distinct from other bird logos because of the unique shape of the beak and head, but Art Modell’s insistence that there be a letter “B”—perhaps a gesture towards the Cleveland fans from whom he stole the team—brings this logo down a bit.
However, the alternate logo is outstanding. The shield takes its design from the Maryland state flag, which is an oasis of originality among a desert of awful American state flags. The use of the flag by the Ravens makes their alternate logo distinctive and culturally significant and it immediately binds the Ravens to their community in a way that few other team logos do.
No, Cleveland doesn’t have an actual logo, and I’m in the minority that thinks that’s okay. They haven’t had a logo since the beginning and that fact itself has become their logo. The name “Browns” is unique, the name of the franchise’s founder and best coach as well as its best player.
They do have the bulldog alternate logo, a reference to the Dawg Pound, which is a nice touch (they also have the weird elf throwback logo that they sometimes use). The color scheme is distinctly Cleveland and somehow uses an odd color brown in an interesting way. The Browns don’t need a logo, they just need a quarterback.
The Panthers’ logo is designed to look like the geographical outline of the Carolinas, which is clever, despite the fact that panthers no longer live in the region. However, the color scheme is only okay and the face lacks anything particularly distinctive among the many cat names in the NFL.
After two seasons of sticking with the name “Oilers” when they moved to Tennessee, the team became the Titans, which is a cool name because the Titans were powerful mythological beings.
The problem with this is that a logo depicting an actual Titan would mostly be unwieldy and difficult to use, so while the comet-like fireball thing is a little ambiguous, you’re not going to get much better than this. The color scheme is nice and the sword-like “T” in a shield-like circle carries a connotation of celestial battle and refers to both the team’s home and its nickname.
The Lions’ logo is one of the few animal logos that doesn’t just depict a face, and pulls it off pretty well despite the difficulty, although it does look a little like the lion is trying to get to some food on a table rather than pouncing at prey.
It is, however, a much-needed update to “Bubbles,” which confused an entire generation of fans who thought that white dot was the lion’s eye and its arms a gaping mouth. The current logo, on the other hand, has strong lines and defined features, including fangs, muscular limbs and a fierce eye.
The name parallels with the baseball Tigers, although there isn’t much else in the way of local connection. The wordmark is mostly boring, and the fact that the capital “L” and lowercase “n” are the same size makes it look a bit weird. Overall, though, the Lions’ logo is above average.
While there technically is no such thing as a seahawk, the logo is supposed to be an osprey, which is a bird of prey found all over the world, including the Pacific Northwest.
The design of the logo is based on a local Native American art style, which is really nice touch. Yes, it is another bird’s head, but like most of the league’s bird logos, it’s distinctive and recognizable.
The Cardinals are the oldest continually operating franchise in the league and are named for the color of the uniforms they wore before they even joined the NFL. The logo and the colors work well together and the design is simple, yet distinctive among the NFL’s flock of bird logos.
I was going to rank the Jaguars fairly low on this list initially—the name itself has little going for it except alliteration as Jaguars are not native to Florida—but the more I looked at the logo, the more I liked it. The jaguar face itself is clearly growling and active. The color scheme is unique, but it lends an eye-pleasing realism to a pretty sharp-looking face, a pleasant upgrade from the sleepy looking cat that used to be the logo.
If you’re going to call yourselves the “Patriots,” you’ve got to go all in on the America and New England did just that. The Minuteman in the logo, the “Flying Elvis,” wears a starred hat that transitions from an 18th-century style tri-cornered hat to a striped flag and the whole thing is bathed in red, white and blue. The team was named for the region’s ties to the American Revolution and the logo is an excellent representation of that name.
The Eagles’ took their name from President Franklin Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration’s eagle logo in 1933. The team used to have a full eagle carrying a football for their logo, but the current logo is just an eagle’s head. The eagle has a distinctive feather pattern and hooked beak and looks like it’s diving downward out of the sky. Overall, it’s solid.
Hey, Colts and Chargers, this is what a good horse logo looks like. The name “Broncos” fits well in Denver and the horse in the logo—which was designed by Nike—looks like it’s charging with its fiery mane flowing behind it. The logo isn’t complex, but it’s very sleek and the colors work well within it.
Dolphins aren’t particularly intimidating animals, so a dolphin that looks sleek and confident is a great choice. The colors are unique, but they work very well in their context. The dolphin itself looks like it’s swimming in a crystal ocean off the Florida coast under a bright sun on a clear day.
In 1948, Cleveland Rams’ halfback and future Denver Broncos’ general manager Fred Gehrke painted rams’ horns on the team’s helmets, making the Rams the first team to have a design on their helmets. The horns stuck to Rams’ helmets from Cleveland to Los Angeles to St. Louis and back to Los Angeles.
That is perhaps the best origin story of any NFL helmet logo and enough reason on its own to put the Rams’ logo high on this list. The actual logo includes those large horns on the head of an angry charging ram, which looks really cool. It’s a clean, simple design that indicates motion and power.
The Dallas Cowboys have one of the most iconic logos in sports and for good reason. The lone star is an inherently Texan symbol and is easily used in all kinds of iconography. The star is simple and easily replicable, yet distinct even from other pentagrams because of its navy blue color and border. The logo is everywhere in AT&T Stadium and for good reason: it’s bold, it’s proud and it’s one of the league’s best logos.
When you share a league and a state with the Dallas Cowboys, how do you make your new expansion team—named the “Texans”—even more Texan than the Cowboys? You make your team’s logo a bull’s head in the colors of the Texas flag with a lone star for its eye!
Seriously, the colors are literally deep steel blue, battle red and liberty white. You don’t get more Texas than that. It’s distinctive, loud, easily replicable and has so many ties to its team’s home, making it one of the best logos in the NFL.
The Steelers’ logo is full of local ties and important symbolism that make it a rallying point for Pittsburgh fans. The black and gold colors are found in all of the city’s professional sports teams and come from the city’s flag, which derives its colors from the coat of arms of William Pitt, for whom the city is named.
The logo itself is a modified Steelmark, which was originally designed and used by Pittsburgh’s U.S. Steel, which speaks to the steel industry and the workers who became Steelers fans during the steel industry boom in the region. The Steelers’ logo is iconic, recognizable and has perhaps the strongest connection to its team’s fans of any NFL logo.
Perhaps no team’s logo is more closely tied to a team’s city than the Saints’. The name “Saints” is a reference to New Orleans’ Catholic population, and the fleur-de-lis is a historic symbol of France and French culture which appears on New Orleans’ flag, which gives it an immediate tie to the city.
It’s a simple, attractive design that carries a lot of meaning. The color scheme even seems to suggest Mardi Gras. The logo is a phenomenal depiction of both the team’s nickname and city the team represents, which makes it the best team logo in the NFL.
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