The 10 Worst Team Names in Sports

In a moment, I will present to you the 10 worst team names in sports I am aware of, but a couple caveats first.

One, I only included American professional and college sports teams.

Two, I deliberately did not do research into the history of any of these names. There's a good reason for this, and that's because you want your team name to have wide appeal and interesting appeal right off the bat. So if you name your team, "The Morons" people are not going to say, "Hmm, perhaps there is some local or historical context that, far from being an insult, makes this a fearsome and impressive nickname! I shall research it. To Wikipedia!" They are going to say, "Haw! They're the Morons! Haw!" This is my "haw!" article.

So please, save your comments about how I unfairly and inaccurately maligned your team's name or its origin, because guys seeing your team's score in the newspaper won't know the back story, either.

10. Philadelphia KiXX (soccer) — This gets the award for most ridiculous capitalization. Capital K, lower case i, capital X, capital X. I hope the guy who thought that would be cool and got the go-ahead for it — I imagine it's some recent Marketing Degree graduate who wears a lot of Axe Body Spray and is openly laughed at when he tries to pickup girls at his upcoming 10-year high school reunion.

9. Everett Aquasox (baseball) — Can we enact a rule that if you are going to name your team the "sox," it has to be preceded by a basic color only? And what is the logo of the Aquasox? A frog with orange feet catching a baseball on his tongue like a fly, of course.

8. Los Angeles Salsa (soccer) — I know it's all the rage to give your team name some local flavor (Ha! Salsa! Flavor!). But can we at least put some limits on that trend? We don't have teams called the Reno Whores or the Cancun Syphilitics. I'm kind of breaking my rule here as the Los Angeles Salsa went belly-up in the nineties. But a girls u-11 soccer team, the Napa Salsa, lives on. So I included it because I never wanted it to be said that I am afraid to mock 10-year-old girls.

7. Delaware Blue Hens (college) — You know how colleges will frequently put "Lady" in front of their women's teams nicknames, like the Tennessee Lady Volunteers? I don't understand why UD does not do the opposite; let's call the football team the Men Blue Hens. It doesn't help that their logo looks better suited for a fast food franchise than a successful athletic program.

6. Kalamazoo Outrage (soccer) — I hope their logo is an senior citizen writing an angry letter to his local paper. My inside sources tell me that "outrage" narrowly beat out the "appall" and the "what's this world a-comin' toos" in voting for a team name.

5. Albuquerque Asylum (soccer) — Does this soccer team house crazies so that they don't harm themselves or others, or do they protect extra-nationals from political persecution? Either way, I feel like this team deserves a lot of red cards.

4. Chicago Aftershock (paintball) — "You know when the ground shakes and shakes and causes buildings to crumble and is just a devastating, epic natural disaster? Well, that's not us. But when it shakes a little afterwards, and you're like, 'Oh God, not again ... whew!' — well, that's totally us!"

3. Omaha Beef (arena football) — Have you ever seen or heard of a team or, more typically, a group of fans cooking and eating their rival's mascot, like LSU fans holding a pig roast before playing Arkansas? Well, the Omaha Beef is already dead, skinned, cleaned, and cooked, so joke's on you, suckers!

2. East County Blackshirts (football) — This team first caught my eye because of the name's queasy closeness to nazi brownshirts. But you know what? I broke my rule regarding research for this article, and there was indeed historically a blackshirts group: they were simply the Italian version of the brownshirts during the fascist WWII era. So nice going, East County, I thought you merely sounded too close to a fascist group, you actually were a fascist group.

1. Kansas City Demize (soccer) — This is a triple whammy of badness. Strike one: "cute" spelling. Strike two: stupid name. Strike three: saying "Kansas City Demise" (or demize) makes it sound like Kansas City is bearing the demise, not dishing it out. Think about it. The Dallas Cowboys are the Cowboys of Dallas. The Chicago Bears are the Bears of Chicago. So the Kansas City Demize must be Demize of Kansas City. What a sassy, funky, hip way to die!