A week and a half ago, the NFL made the mistake of creating a standardized logo for the Super Bowl. This ends the tradition and excitement of creating a new identity for each year’s game. From now on, each Super Bowl will use the same logo, slightly tweaking it each year for the correct Roman Numerals and host city.
I understand perfectly well the NFL’s reasoning behind this decision. First off, creating a new logo each year is hard work. More importantly, the league wants to gain some consistently over their image and this can and will certainly help. The league’s 2007 tweaking of its own logo is another example of this.
But the NFL is going about their visual identity in the wrong way. They are thinking about the Super Bowl in the same way someone thinks about the Rose Bowl, or the Orange Bowl, or any other college game, where the logo stays the same each year (pending ridiculous changes by sponsors of course). This is the wrong way to think about the Super Bowl. The NFL’s point of reference should not be college bowl games: it should be the Olympics or the World Cup.
The Super Bowl is the only championship game in the Big Four American sports that plays its game at a neutral ground. Thus each year, hypothetically at least, the Super Bowl is meant to display some sort of local flavor. At the very least, these logos give us something to look back on: I love checking out old Olympic logos, and I’m sure that with time we will all learn to love the London 2012 logo.
I wish the NFL did this differently. Sure, some of the logos lacked consistency. But now we are stuck with a lackluster logo that instantly dates the Super Bowl to the mid-noughties obsessed with chrome era. Instead, I believe the NFL should commission a new logo each year and get the work done by a shop located in the host city. How’s that for local flare?
