It’s a lot of fun being an American sports fan, because we complain about pretty much everything there is to complain about, and when we finally get what we want, we complain even more. Case in point – the NCAA has given us a brand new College Football Playoff system, and with it four new logos to choose from. Fans have until Monday to vote on one of four proposed logos, and so far the consensus seems to be that they all flat out suck.

Now, those are random people’s words who may not exist and not mine. I think the logos are okay. Nah, who am I kidding? I’m the one who thinks all four options suck. I tried to make it seem like other people hate them, but I’m just speaking for me. There, it feels good to be honest.

But because I don’t like to crap all over something without offering my own alternative, I have actually made a College Football Playoff logo that the NCAA can add to the voting contest at no charge, except for the small fee that I’ve included after the jump.

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The University of Connecticut’s athletics department decided that it was time for a change when it came to the school’s worn out sports logo that had been in use since the Paleolithic Era known as 2002. And new logos are always great news, because they mean new merchandise and more money, as us sucker fans just slap the plastic down on the counter and shout, “GIVE ME NEW SH*T, A-HOLES!” at the local bookstore so we can look cool beans when the new season begins.

As for UCONN’s new look, it’s that mean-looking husky above, with that look that says, “Hey, take our sports seriously or else!” Don’t take my word for it, either. Listen to UCONN’s Big Daddy Swagger himself, Geno Auriemma, who is hot off of winning his 8th NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship.

Head women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma says he is eager to see the new look on his student-athletes.

“This logo is everything that a Husky is supposed to be – powerful, aggressive, determined,” he says. “It is looking right through you and saying ‘Do not mess with me.’ This is a streamlined, fighting dog, and I cannot wait for it to be on our uniforms and court.” (Via UCONN Today)

Adding, “It has zip, zorp and zazz!”

But while looking at the evolution of UCONN’s logo, I couldn’t help but notice something very interesting.

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Often times, when I’m doing my morning interwebbrowsinggooglebingtumbletweet routine and sucking down 6 gallons of coffee, I’ll stumble across a picture or video that’s really cool, and I’ll be like, “Hey, the With Leather readers might like this” and then I realize that it’s three years old and it’s already been watermarked by 60 sites that had nothing to do with making it. But sometimes I’m willing to make an exception under the Burnsy Rule of “I ain’t never seen this” and today is one of those days.

Yesterday, CBS Sports re-blogged or re-Tumbled, whatever it’s called, a bigger version of the above image that features a collection of “What If?” city sports team logos. Basically, someone got all hopped up on Photoshop juice and asked the question that nobody else was asking – “What would it look like if sports teams in major cities combined their logos?” And I thought that was really cool. But the problem was, damn dude, why are those logos so tiny?

So I went back to the source of the image, thanks to Tumblr’s handy “Okay, who really posted this?” feature, and that was a dead end, because the person who blogged it 500 notes ago had nothing to do with making it. Thankfully, I know how to type and I have a functional IQ, and I was able to search a little and determine that not only did that awesome image come from a message board thread at Chris Creamer’s Sports Logos from earlier this year, but the creative kids commenting on that site went off with this fun idea.

Specifically, a commenter named “Firefly” had a field day with a variety of sports city logos from Washington DC to San Diego and back, and other commenters joined in to rep their favorite cities. Some of them are awesome and some need a little work, but after the jump you can pick your favorites and then go get them tattooed on your faces like good sports fans.

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David Martin, president and general manager of new independent baseball Frontier League team the London Rippers, doesn’t understand why people think he named the team after Jack the Ripper, the infamous serial killer who raped and murdered prostitutes. I mean, this is London Ontario, not London England, for crying out loud, and the mascot in the logo wearing a 19th-century top hat named “Jack” for your team called the “Rippers” is purely coincidental. And the prostitute who had her abdomen sliced open and uterus removed by Dave Martin during the team’s first press conference? Well now you’re just reaching for straws!

He said any association with Jack the Ripper is all a misunderstanding.

“I could have made it another fluffy animal that every other teams seems to do,” he said, adding he wanted to do something “edgy.”

The team logo shows Jack wearing a black top hat and trench coat that covers most of his face, except for his eyes. Martin says the connection to Jack the Ripper never came up when the logo was designed.

The best part of Jack the Actual Ripper never coming up during the creation of his team is the slogan at the top of their promotional posters: “Lurking in LaBatt park this spring …”

Come on, Dave, seriously? You can take the “we wanted to be edgy” route and name your team the Rippers as a statement against the extreme sensitivity of the modern sports attitude, but those posters might as well have Troll Gaze on them. They should reprint them with “Literally gutting you and removing your entrails in a dark alleyway because you’re a woman this spring …”

I’m going to start a Minor League team in Austin called the “Dahmers”, put a frozen cat head with a human penis jammed in its ear on my logo and spend the next six months issuing press statements that read, “heh, come on, get a life”.

[via London Free Press, h/t to Fark Sports]

Kansas’ Chapman High School calls themselves the “Fighting Irish” and, like so many other high schools and rec league teams across the country, just copy-pastas the Notre Dame University leprechaun logo. Earlier this week, news broke that the school had been formally asked by Notre Dame to stop using the logo. Why is this news? Because the school had been ravaged by tornadoes and only re-opened in January.

Most news outlets have taken a “stay classy” approach to Notre Dame’s demands, calling them out for throwing their weight around and bullying a poor, innocent, geographically-unlucky public school that I guess thinks misfortune puts them above the law and can’t afford to sit a teen down with a pencil and a pad of paper and say “draw us a logo”.

The latest condemnation comes from the only people left in this world I thought I could trust: Next Media Animation, the absurdist geniuses from Taiwan, who have done everything from showing Yao Ming being birthed from a basketball egg to having David Stern chop an NBA-flavored pizza in half with a chainsaw.

I thought maybe they’d understand me and give the Chapman Fighting Irish red monster eyes or something, but nope, even they’ve turned the Notre Dame leprechaun into a whip-lashing slave-driver who wants to destroy the lives of children. The video ends with them giving him the finger and kicking him into the sky, where he disappears in a flash of light like he’s in Team Rocket. At no point do the children get haunted by ghosts or fired into space on a rocket ship.

Is Taiwanese animation getting preachy?

[h/t SOB]

What you see on the left is the classic logo of the Toronto Blue Jays, the one the Jays wore in 1977, the one they wore during back-to-back World Series championship wins in ’92 and ’93. What you see on the right is the club’s new logo for 2012, an image that leaked on Wednesday and follows the Miami Marlins 1970s gas station clusterf**k in a string of recent, could-be should-be logo leaks.

Just like the Marlins leak, the team won’t confirm or deny, but makes it pretty clear that they aren’t going to deny. From thestar.com:

“We won’t comment on rumours or speculation … at such a time as when we have an announcement to make, we will happily release that information,” [Jays’ spokesperson Jay] Stenhouse said Thursday.

Two things:

1. Canadian spelling of “rumors” left in for your enjoyment
2. Do you think Jay Stenhouse got the Jays spokesperson job because his name is “Jay”?

If this turns out to be their new logo, it beats the hell out of their last decade of tough guy muscular birds and italicized art deco disasters. It’s what an updated logo should be — a cleaned-up, sleek design that keeps with the times without pretending the greatest and most prosperous times in your team’s history didn’t happen. It also (hopefully) prevents the Jays marketing team from thinking “creepy looking man-birds” is what people want to see.

Because seriously:

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