Fans Rank Vikings Logo 5th Best in the League
Because it’s the off-season and people expect daily (if not hourly) content, the site FanJuicer.com recently conducted a poll of its fans to see which teams had the best (and worst) logos in the 32-team league. Stuff like this is interesting because it’s hard to really tell where your opinions rank against objectivity or in more general terms and so while a lot of Vikings fans (like me) think that the team has the best name/logo/helmet, it’s hard to say if that’s just more of the purple kool-aid that we all drink or if it’s really something that other people agree with (or even understand, considering what the name Vikings means in terms of the ethnicity of many people locally). So, let’s take a look at what they came up with!
The Vikings ended up with the fifth overall “best” logo in the league, which is a lot higher than I anticipated (mainly because I’m used to bad news), so who beat them and more importantly where to the Packers rank?
As you can see, the Saints nabbed the overall spot with 154 votes, which was only 7 more than the Vikings received (which goes to show you how close this thing was for everyone outside of Cleveland). The Lions tied the Saints with 154, followed by the Falcons and Rams (What?), then the Vikings, Eagles, Bills, Broncos and Texans. The Packers and Bears ended up really low, probably because it looks like logos that are comprised of letters of the city/state/region that a team plays for aren’t considered as “good” by the fans (clearly). Green Bay was thus 20th, whereas the Bears were in the bottom five of all logos at the 27th spot. That’s satisfying.
The Vikings logo may be high up on the list because it’s been around for a long time and hasn’t really changed (much) in the 50-plus years of the team’s existence. According to TheVikingAge.com, the logo was created by Los Angeles Times cartoonist Karl Hubenthal and was meant to represent a “Scandinavian warrior” which was a reference to the number of people from Scandinavia who live in Minnesota (compared to other states). In regards to changes the logo has undergone over the years, the article says:
“Since then, color has been added to the face of the logo and the hair, the horn color has changed, and the detail in the horns and hair have changed, but the spirit and recognition of the logo have remained the same.”
The Vikings have always polled as a top-five or ten team nationally in terms of having a following outside of the state that a team plays in and that’s always been something that I’ve chatted with my friends about as you’d think that a team that has put its fans through as much as the Vikings would have the same popularity as the Browns. My dad, who has been a fan his entire life and whose brother was a higher up in the Southern California Vikings fan club, thinks that the aesthetics and name of the team as it’s both appropriate and badass (something a lot of recent names definitely aren’t, I’m looking at you Minnesota “Wild”, ugh) are the reasons for that. The fact that they also had the “Purple People Eaters” in the ’70’s and then Randy Moss (and Cris Carter) for my generation, means that people have a lot of reasons to watch the team even if they never seem to be able to win when it counts. But, this at least shows that the logo/name has something to do with that following.
Either way, those out there who have a tattoo of the Vikings somewhere on their body can take a deep sigh of relief knowing that other people consider their tattoo pretty awesome (unless it’s near a tattoo of a Chinese character, which is like a black hole of lameness that sucks other tattoos into it). Now they just have to worry about using a cheese grater to remove it after games like last seasons NFC Championship.
