Old-school NFL teams shamelessly stole from MLB: NY Giants? Chicago Bears vs Cubs and Detroit Lions vs Tigers? Come on, guys!
Also, Detroit Tigers / Lions seems geographically inappropriate.
I keep waiting for the city to add The Detroit Ligers.
I HATE that someone could name a team the SAME name as a team in another city: “Next up in Sports, the Giants may be in a bit of trouble next season…” Wait, NY Giants or SF Giants?
But there are panthers (actual panthers and not just the hockey team). Even if there only around 20 in the wild. Personally, I think it is pretty easy to mix up some of those larger cat species.
there are Florida Panthers which is where the NHL team got their name.
Imagine what it must have been like in New York before the Giants moved to San Francisco.
I have read several sources claiming the New York Jets were named as an homage to the Mets, but there isn’t any actual evidence that is true, and there IS contemporaneous evidence they were named that upon moving to Shea Stadium because La Guardia airport is right there. Also in 1963 jets and air travel were symbols of sophistication and coolness.
And the Nets is a good name for a basketball team, particularly one in a city that has the Mets and the Jets (who obviously were aware that Jets rhymes with Mets, even being the dumb jocks that they are).
Yankees is a another good name with a historical connection.
Which is why the NFL team is legally incorporated as the “New York Football Giants,” a term which still gets used from time to time (probably more ironically than anything else).
And, for that matter, from 1960 until 1987, “the St. Louis Cardinals” wasn’t descriptive enough, either (though the NFL team wasn’t originally founded in St. Louis, and, as noted upthread, was not named after the baseball team).
The World Team Tennis franchise there was the Sets.
Other nicknames that haven’t yet been mentioned, which I feel fit their locations particularly well:
Miami Dolphins
Dallas Cowboys
Houston Oilers
Minnesota Vikings *
Colorado Rockies
Miami Marlins
Milwaukee Brewers
San Diego Padres
Seattle Mariners
Milwaukee Bucks
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- Yes, I know, there are no actual Vikings, per se, in Minnesota, but there are an awful lot of Scandinavian-Americans.
- Yes, I know, there are no actual Vikings, per se, in Minnesota, but there are an awful lot of Scandinavian-Americans.
And there’s a sports gambling company called (what else) New York Bets.
In the CFL, a league with less than 10 teams, two of them were called the Roughriders/Rough Riders for decades. For most of that time they also had the same team colors.
The Jets were the Titans for their first 3 seasons when they played at the Polo Grounds , the baseball Giants played there before their move to SF.
The Dodgers and the Lakers are two interesting cases. While both names were definitely more geographically appropriate to their original locations, the teams have become iconic enough that I associate their names more with the teams themselves than the original definitions. They have appropriated the meanings in my mind.
In other words, I hear “Lakers” and I think of basketball, not lakes. I hear “Dodgers” and I think of baseball, not folks darting across trolley tracks. I guess it’s just me, but that is decidedly not true of, say, “Jazz” or “Grizzlies.”
The NFL had at one time or another copied at least the following baseball names:
- Cleveland Indians
- Detroit Tigers
- Detroit Wolverines
- Hartford Blues
- Kansas City Blues
- Kansas City Cowboys
- Louisville Colonels
- New York Giants
- New York Yankees/New York Yanks
- Brooklyn Dodgers
- Cincinnati Reds
Why should this matter? I think the rules should be even looser. I don’t know why the NFL shouldn’t have both an Indianapolis Colts and a Baltimore Colts if the fans in both cities like those names enough.
There are only so many good names anyway.
I’m sure it wasn’t that big a deal.
In St. Louis, before the football Cardinals moved away, locals used to refer to the baseball team as the Redbirds, and the football team as the Big Red.
Are there many Raptors in Toronto?
That always struck me as a particularly lame name. It’s not as if there were any famous dinosaur beds around Toronto. It was just an attempt to get some publicity from the popularity of Jurassic Park at the time the team was established.
The Montreal Expos also had a lame name. What the hell is an Expo? The name didn’t really have any relevance even at the time they were named in 1969, two years after Expo 67 in Montreal.
How about the Nashville Predators? Doesn’t that word have disturbing connotations?
It was really only in the mid-50s that both the baseball and the football teams were popular at the same time. The football Giants were good in the 1930s, but the NFL wasn’t such a big deal then. They didn’t win another championship game until 1956, and by 1958 the baseball Giants were gone.
I always felt the Houston Texans was a name thought up with very little effort. I think it was from a fans poll, but still, an uninspired choice.
The Carolina Hurricanes is regionally appropriate.