Okay, so I’ve been a huge NFL fan my whole life, and I love trivia and random facts. The other day, I was thinking, “I wonder if there’s an NFL team name that doesn’t exist?” It seemed like a fun little challenge, and a good opportunity to keep my record of all the things I’ve tried and tested. So here’s the path I went down, with all the glorious mess-ups included.
Brainstorming and Initial List
First, I just started brainstorming. I grabbed a piece of paper and a pen – gotta love the old-school methods – and jotted down every animal, object, historical figure, and random idea that popped into my head. My list was ALL over the place. We’re talking:
- Animals: Sharks, Wolves, Cobras, Eagles (oops, already a team!), etc.
- Objects: Rockets, Cannons, Hammers… you get the idea.
- Concepts: Patriots (another oops!), Warriors, Legends.
It was a beautiful, chaotic mess. I felt like I was onto something. Or, many somethings. The key was that the name needed something to associate with the NFL’s combat-like competition. I did a little research and that was how I found a list.
The Organized Approach (aka Using the Internet)
Okay, my handwritten list was getting unwieldy. I had to use the internet.I quickly found a complete list of all 32 current NFL team names. I was on many website and did some comparison. This was my savior. No more guessing if something was already taken!
Cross-Referencing and Elimination
This is where the real work began. I took my brainstorm list and started comparing it to the official NFL list. It was a slow process of elimination:
- “Oh, the Ravens? Nope, they exist.”
- “The Sharks? Nope, I thought there was one!”
- “What about…the Sentinels? Hmm, that sounds cool…”
I kept going back and forth, researching any name that sounded remotely plausible. Some names I thought were made up, like the “Buccaneers,” turned out to be real. You know, pirates and stuff, makes sense for Tampa Bay. Learned something new!
The “Aha!” Moment (and a Few False Alarms)
After a lot of searching and crossing things off, I narrowed it * wasn’t any NFL team name I could find to meet my *’s a name that sounds perfectly reasonable, evokes a sense of power and maybe a bit of *’s general enough that it could probably fit various locations.
Of course, I double-checked, triple-checked, and then Googled some more, just to be absolutely sure. I even looked at defunct NFL teams and some of the proposed names for expansion teams over the years. Nope, nothing.
So, there you have it. It was a fun little exercise, and it reminded me that sometimes the most interesting discoveries come from simple curiosity and a bit of dedicated digging. And that my brainstorming can get really, really messy. But, I learned something.
