Roanoke Rail Yard Dawgs

76

NOTE: This review incorporates text from the previous review for the Rail Yard Dawgs, posted on 2016 November 13.

The Roanoke Rail Yard Dawgs actually changed their logo back in 2020, but I'm just now getting around to doing the review. I'm not sure why. Maybe I didn't consider this logo different enough from the original. Maybe it's because they didn't play the 2020-21 season thanks to the pandemic. Or maybe I had enough stress going on that year (didn't we all?) and couldn't bear to look at this awful logo for this team with an awful name any more than necessary.

And it is an awful name and an awful logo. We'll start with the name. Rail Yard Dawgs. They obviously started with the expression junkyard dog and changed it to railyard to tie in to Roanoke's history as a railyard hub, and then changed the spelling of Dogs to Dawgs because they didn't realize what a stupid thing to do that is. But there's a major problem here, which is that a junkyard dog is a good idea and a railyard dog is an incredibly bad idea. Junkyard dogs guard the junkyard during off hours. Railyard dogs, on the other hand, just get in the trains' way. Or, worse yet, they get run over by the trains. Yeah, that's grim, but it's not like trains can stop on a dime, so if the dog doesn't get out of the way for whatever reasons, it's going to get killed. And I could be wrong, but I'm fairly certain not that the image the team is trying to convey here.

And then there's the logo. A disembodied daw— er, dog's head wearing an engineer's cap (or is that a conductor's cap? Is there a difference? If so, what is it?) hovering over what I presume is supposed to be the word DAWGS made into a boxcar, except that the boxcar is slanted in a way that I'm fairly certain would interfere with a boxcar's job of carrying cargo. Also, the wheels are in the wrong spot. And then there's the partial circle in the backgr— you know what? I don't have time or space to write everything that's wrong with this logo. Let's just say that it's really bad and leave it at that.

And the bad part is this logo is actually an improvement over the old one. The old one was a lot busier, had weird foreshortening on the hockey stick, and oh, by the way, had a dog holding a hockey stick. It's like someone with the team told the logo designer, "Basically, we want the same logo, but we want it to suck less." And it does suck less. But it still sucks.

What the team should have done, of course, is tell the designer to make the same logo not suck at all. Not that it would have worked, because you can't keep anything remotely resembling this logo and have it not suck at all. Maybe the team did tell the designer that, and to be fair the designer did what he could, but it was an impossible ask.

At least they didn't tell the designer to make the logo more accurate. Nobody needs a logo with a dog getting run over by a train.

Final Score: 76 points.
Penalties: Misspell, 11 pts; Compound, 13 pts; Wordplay, 7 pts; Alliteration, 2 pts; Cartoon, 17 pts; Anthropomorphization, 10 pts; Name-Logo, 2 pts; Equip-Logo (egregious), 8 pts; Yucky-Name, 4 pts; Yucky-Logo, 5 pts
Bonuses: Local, -3 pts.