NFL: Ranking every team logo from worst to best

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.