The fighting Gonads of Ball State

As you may have noticed we're freaks for details around here. One logo change that has developed into a trend over the past few years is making your teams mascot slightly meaner, slightly angrier looking. My first real notice of it years ago was the Bills changing from the static cud chewing, standing Buffalo to the streaking ton of buffalo meat horn bone and sinew that we know and love today. The Falcon is now more swept wing than just a few years ago, the Eagle more threatening etc, etc. My personal favorite is the redesign that consists of little more than changing the angle of attack on the eyebrow of the mascot to indicate more anger or determination.
First it was the slightly angrier Cardinal and now its the slightly angrier Dolphin. Unfortunately in their first year of switching from the happy flipper/Snowflake model to the angry attack mode aquatic mammal, they proceeded to go out and have one of the most horrific seasons in franchise history. Apparently their opponents were less than intimidated by flipper having a bad day and threatening to take it out on someone. The Cardinals? Well God bless 'em, I wish 'em well but they've always just been the Cardinals and even though they often look like they're on the verge of doing something, their bird in a snit also failed to intimidate.
Still I just love the idea that by increasing the angle of attack on the eyebrow of the animal, one increases ones chance of winning. Someone should send a memo to the association of league logo designers reminding them that the Browns had an ungodly decade long streak of dominating the leaugue somewhere in or around the 50's and did it with no mascot or logo at all. And while they're at it they could point out the Steelers dominance of the 70' was accomplished with one side of their helmet blank and the other sporting a non angry eyed semi corpoate logo on the other and no mascot at all. I'm just saying. Detroit should perhaps consider some change of their Lion logo. Perhaps the addition of an angry eye might help them... or maybe a streaking lion. How about a streaking Lion about to sink its teeth into the ass of a Gazelle? God knows the pose that's somewhere between the one on the Lowenbrau label and the "just escaped from the enclosure and about to disembowel a zookeeper" pose, hasn't done anything for them... ever. The Chargers have never won a Super Bowl but they won AFC championships and have a winning tradition and they're named after electricity. You don't argue with it. It works. I'm not a fan of they're recent redesign but their uniforms used to rock. Thankfully I think we don't ever have to worry about them trying to add an angry eye to the bolt.
Seahawks, Ravens, angry eye. Panthers, Broncos, Jaguars, angry eyes. Raiders... one eye and an eye patch. Bucs... empty eye socket. I love the Redskins uniform but if you look real close at the Redskin of the logo he has the sad eye of that crying roadside litter lamenting Indian from the old commercial. Him, I would actually recommend some kind of update for. They should go with Geronimo or Crazy horse or some Redskin who actually did instil some fear in opponents. Now there's a group of guys who had a reason to have an angry eye! Ram, Viking, Panther, all angry eyes. The Patriot is something of an exception looking more stoic than angry. I salute their refusing to jump on the irritated ocular bandwagon.
Which brings me back to my title. One day while vegging on the couch watching TV with Johnny O we heard a college score from a game involving Ball State. Doing our usual Beavis and Butthead riffing we began to wonder what kind of mascot ball state might have. We eventually settled on the Fighting Gonads. Not satisfied with the excellent name we began to envision the helmet side logo and it seemed perfect that the gonad is shaped just like a prolate spheroid... or football. So we sketched out a helmet complete with side logo gonad and trailing squiggly vas deferens tube. Then we modified the vas deferens stretching it out a bit and adding motion lines to make it a streaking gonad.
It still seemed to be missing something so we gave it an eye to add some personality. Of course we laughed like hyenas throughout the whole process but still it didn't feel finished. After the latest round of laughter subsided we sighed and sat back. Then in a moment of inspired genius that presaged the helmet designers of today John leaned forward without a word and with one stroke of his pencil added ... yep, you guessed it... the angry eyebrow. We exploded in laughter, tears rolling down our cheeks till our faces hurt and till the day I die I'll never hear a score involving that college without seeing the image of the Fighting Gonad of Ball state.... and his angry eyebrow.
Uniform designers around the league take note. Johnny O and I are available for free lance work.