New Big Ten Logo Disappoints Most
The Big Ten Conference revealed its new logo today and I don’t think the designers at Pentagram are getting the feedback they hoped for.
In their defense, they were given the tough task of replacing the ultra-creative existing logo, which injected an 11 (representing the number of schools in the Big Ten) seamlessly into its design. I didn’t expect much, but their efforts left a lot to be desired.
That all being said, I don’t think the new logo is a total bust. The biggest mistake of this unveiling process was showing the logo in its simplest form – one color (and about the most un-bold color possible) on a white background. They should have dressed the design up a bit introducing the new look with 3D effects, reflections, and textures so people could get an idea how the logo would look when polished. Also, I have no idea what the purpose of the bottom horizontal bar is. If they want the full effect of the negative space to work, I think they should have left that element off.
In summary, my first impression of the new logo was that it looked very amateurish – but with a bit of styling, a color adjustment, and lopping off the bottom 10%… it could be saved.
There were 256 regular season NFL games and ten postseason games so far this year for a total of 266 games…or more importantly, 1,064 quarters played and 1,064 combinations of winning scores. Even though there are 100 squares on the board, we’ll group like combinations (i.e. 3-7 and 7-3) to make our findings a little clearer (figure 1).
Data from 40 years of Super Bowls tells much of the same story as the 06-07 NFL season (figure 2). The top five combos from 160 Super Bowl quarters are the same as the 06-07 (7-4 is tied for fifth), and again, almost 2/3 of the scores end in 0, 3 or 7. On the flip side, 19 combinations of numbers have failed to appear in the Super Bowl, including the three that didn’t hit in all of 06-07. The number you certainly want to stay away from is 5 as it has partnered only with 0, 1, and 9 for winning combinations (not even 5-3 or 5-7 have happened in the Super Bowl!).
While we can’t do the same type of combination matrix for individual teams as we have in the rest of the analysis, we can look at the Colts and Bears most frequent scores this year (figure 3). The Colts have played 19 games (76 quarters of data) while the Bears have played one less game (four less quarters). The top three numbers for the Colts were 7, 4 and 0 (in that order, with 3 a close 4th) while the Bears most frequent scores were the predictable 0, 3 and 7. Indy managed to hit all ten numbers at some point in the season although 2 and 8 only once and 5 twice. The Bears never landed on 5 and they only had 2 once.
