As Eric said, it's getting mixed reviews and from what I read, I understand it. The ONLY thing UND has done correctly in this whole affair is to seek advice from its staff, students, faculty, and alumni.
After that, it simply disregarded what those groups were saying in favor of the overriding political mantra "We can't do what you want because we're acting for the greater good and you're too stuck in the wrong to notice."
I don't recall a time (in more facets that mere athletics) where the "greater good" was so corrupted by agendas than the last 10 years or so.
In any case, here's my take on the new logo.
If this logo had been the winning submission from a community outreach program, such as a contest, I think it would be more palatable than the reality of the situation: We paid millions of dollars for what was correctly deemed to be an overly simplistic, almost canned generic font for the ND and as for the "hawk..." Gosh if that doesn't look like a slightly modified version of:
Just remove all of the blue and add black highlights and black dots for eyes and well...
My problem isn't that it is ugly. It's not a good looking logo, but it's not ugly either. My problem is that we wasted a LOT of money on a logo that surely will become the crown jewel of wasted taxpayer money (whether or not it was taxpayer money or otherwise).
Nevertheless, I argue that UND couldn't win this logo idea anyways. The only way UND would have come out of this debacle looking at least ok is if they would have allowed the no nickname option on the ballot. Sure, the PC crowd wouldn't have been happy but that would have constituted less than 40% of the UND greater community (I would assume).
However, people are already forgetting the silver lining: a logo isn't static. Many MANY teams have alternate logos. It would be very easy for UND to alter or change their logo after a year or so and relegate this new one to an alternative jersey format or, if Coach Schweigert likes it so much, it could be football only.
If I were the new UND President, whomever that is, I'd turn to UND's art department, alumni association, and perhaps even the greater UND community and hold a contest to design the new logo much like what got us the final Sioux logo. The University can stipulate what would constitute a legal submission and what would not.
For example, the hawk can not have any feathers even remotely resembling an eagle feather simply due to the fact that the Native Americans hold a de facto copyright on ALL such representations.
It's doable and I'm fairly certain that, at this point, they will strongly consider it.
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