Carolina: Just One State in the SportsNation

The Carolina Panthers designed a new logo last week.  It's their first logo update since they founded the franchise back in 1993 and played their first NFL season in 1995.  It's a big difference...

Old logo on the left (1993-2012), New logo on the right (2012-present)

The font choice is a bigger change.  The Zubaz-era font has been tweaked to something very bland. Someone has tamed the X-treme panther of the 90s just a bit too much.

Top:  Xtreme 1990s boom-economy font.  Bottom:  Unremarkable 2010s post-recession font.

Gah. The font geek in me is a fan of neither. The panther scratch marks on some of the letters in the new font don't help much. If one could somehow sum these fonts together and take their average, you might have something worth putting in a logo. 

At least it's not teal.

But this blog is about maps, not fonts or sports team logos.  Let's get to the relevant maps.


ESPN's SportsNation performs daily and weekly polls. Though online polling isn't useful for, just as an example, accurate political polling, it is thoroughly useful for entertainment value. And ESPN does a darn fine job of it.  Here's the Carolina Panthers logo question:

This question is only a screen capture.  You can't vote here.

After you vote, it performs some cross tabulations on the answers, and provides a handy map of the most popular answer by state, the District of Columbia, or the rest of the world.

North Carolina is keen on the Panthers' new logo.  Everyone else says "Meh."

Best yet, you can hover over the state to see more detailed results.

Some questions get very regional results.  In 2008, the Seattle SuperSonics were relocated to Oklahoma and renamed the Oklahoma CityThunder.  Recently, there has been rumblings that the NBA would consider going back to Seattle.  ESPN captured sentiment in a poll.

The Pacific Northwest wants the SuperSonics back.  Oklahoma City wants to keep their Thunder.

I doubt the Thunder would return to Seattle; however, the regionality of the "false" responses in the Oklahoma, Kansas, and Arkansas might show some underlying lingering fears of them returning or, perhaps, thoughts that Seattle doesn't deserve a team.

Personally, I think that the NBA seems hollow without the Sonics in Seattle.  It would be like the NFL not having the Browns in Cleveland.