A redwing is. A Red Wing is not. The Detroit logo shows a wheel with a red wing on it, so it’s not referring to a bird.
“East is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.” – Marx
Read “Sundials” in the new issue of Aboriginal Science Fiction. www.sff.net/people/rothman
::pompous cough::
Yesss, some truly worthy contenders here. But I must offer (drum roll)…
The Monmouth Zippers!
Yes, Monmouth, IL. Check it out.
Doper Quiz upcoming (splort!): create the best cheer for this team, folks!
Thank you, thank you…
Veb
Okay, tacky redundant follow up, but in all truth the award should go to Elle’s “Fighting Okra”. (Team rallying cry, “We slimed them!”)
Gumbo!
Veb
In Albuquerque, there is a Catholic school called St. Pius X, whose team is the “Sartans” Not Spartans, Sartans. Nobody I’ve talked to knows what a “sartan” is.
BrainWeasel- Yes, I’ve heard of the Lansing Lugnuts. My aunt lives in Lansing. My sister went to visit her one year, and attended a game. She even bought the t-shirt, which she has to explain repeatedly.
“That’s entertainment!” —Vlad the Impaler
Speaking of defunct teams…If I’m not mistaken the Chicago Clowns were a team in the Negro Leagues. I wonder if they drove out onto the field in a tiny car?
I always thought my school won the award for best use of irony - we were the “Fighting Quakers.”
Ahem, story time: when UCSC was founded in 1965, it was a small school and had no sports at all. Intramural teams jokingly called themselves the Banana Slugs, cause the sluggies live on campus. So do deer and raccoons and mountain lions, but banana slugs was funniest. Anyway, in 1980 UCSC joined the NCAA, and had to come up with an official mascot. The administration came up with Sea Lions, which the students protested as being lame (cause it is), and eventually won back the slugs. Having the slug as our school mascot also gives us the opportunity to have lots of amusing clothes and pins and such.
Also good is the UC Irvice Anteaters.
~Kyla
Banana Slug class of 2000
I once did some research on old minor-league players and I came across the “Idaho Falls Russets” in the Pioneer League in the 1950’s.
I’d always joked that an Idaho team should call itself the Idaho Potatoes, and this one came pretty darned close.
For those who don’t know: “Russet Burbank” is the official name of the type (breed? strain?) of potato sold as Idaho Potato.
Chaim Mattis Keller
cmkeller@compuserve.com
“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
The only place I’ve heard of a Sartan is as a race of godlike magicians in the Death Gate fantasy series. I’m sure that school’s name predates the books by quite a bit, though. Anyone know if sartan actually means anything?
Mr. Armageddon
“Just when you thought you had all the answers, I went and changed the questions!”–Roddy Piper
WAG : The Red Wings were named after the company that made Red Wing boots. The team and the boot company do have similar logos.
Goodrich Martians.
Sorta off-topic, but back in the college intramural softball team days, the captain of my team was trying to think of a creative team name that was different from the over-done “Beer Swillers” and “Drunk Monkeys” that most other teams were using. He chose “Zoinks”… but his handwriting on the application was so bad that it was entered as “2 Drinks.” That was the name of our team for the rest of the year. “2 Drinks.”
Sucks to your assmar.
My favorite is how women’s teams approximate the nickname of the men’s teams to make them somehow different and feminine.
Off the top of my head, the woman’s basketball team at UMASS refers to itself as The Lady Minutemen!
There are others, no less silly than that…
Yer pal,
Satan
My softball team in high school: The Meadow Muffins.
Very intimidating. 
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge…others just gargle.
Any school with Bulldogs as the mascot.
Their women’s teams almost invariably go with…The lady dogs.
Yup, that’s what I want to be known as.
Ours wasn’t bad, just stupid: The William & Mary Tribe. Ooookay.
And yes, the women were the Lady Tribe.
“Men are from Earth, women are from Earth. Deal with it.” - George Carlin
A local high school team’s nickname is the Estevan Elecs.
For Irony don’t forget the WHA’s Minnesota Fighting Saints.
You want brilliance BEFORE I’ve had my coffee!!!
For a brief (scary) time in my youth, I attended a private boarding school in butt**** Tennessee. The school was known as The Webb School, and all the teams were called…
.
.
.
.
. (wait for it!)
.
.
.
.
.
. [font color=red]THE WEBB FEET![/font color=red]
The mascot was this gnarly old dirty icky giant tennis shoe with hairy, clawed toes sticking out of the holes at the end of the shoe. And the student body did this spastic cheer/dance thing (en masse), called the Feet Gleep, which cannot be adequately described in mixed company, but which greatly resembles an orgy of inebriated water buffaloes (only, everyone’s clothed). But of course, this sort of sick depravity is to be expected in a place where people eat burgoo.
StoryTyler
I am too in shape! :::muttering::: Round is a shape.
RATS! The color thing didn’t work! Can anyone tell me what I did wrong there…?
Mullinator,
The Georgia Bitches has a nice ring to it too!