Have you heard that there is a new Las Vegas football team? Have you heard the name? I don’t get it either. Below are two articles looking at both sides of the rational for the name of the newest Vegas home team.
Please leave me a comment regarding your thoughts on the new team, the name, and your odds on bet on how many season before this league is out of business like all the other teams that have tried to make a go of it.

United Football League Introduces Las Vegas Locomotives as Team Name & Unveils Uniforms

LAS VEGAS (August 10, 2009) – At a press conference today, United Football League Commissioner Michael Huyghue announced the Las Vegas franchise will be named the Locomotives and unveiled innovative team uniforms showcasing the Locomotives’ “Premiere” season colors of silver, blue and white. The name “Locomotives” was selected after reviewing more than thirty thousand fan entries and receiving interpretation from industry experts and an in-house creative team on what attributes the fans were seeking with their submissions. Las Vegas Locomotives Head Coach Jim Fassel was also in attendance at the press event.

“It was critical for us to select team names that we felt best reflected the local community while simultaneously defining the personality of the team,” said Commissioner Huyghue. “Las Vegas was originally established in 1905 with the opening of the Salt Lake, San Pedro and Los Angeles Railroads. We wanted to honor the vast history of the city and the intrinsic benefits that this innovation provided to the community.”

Previously, the UFL announced Miami-based GameWear Team Sports as the League’s official uniform supplier. GameWear Team Sports is one of the leading athletic uniform outfitters in the country and has worked extensively in growing the sport of football on the grassroots level. Award-winning designer Ron Caruso of Purepartner created all the teams’ uniforms using derivatives of the official League logo for all the designs while making each one distinctive.

“The inspiration for the “Premiere” season uniform design comes directly from the UFL shield and its foundation colors which represent “green grass”, “blue sky” and silver for innovation,” said Caruso. “Throughout the uniforms, we used the dimensional “arc” of the shield on the chest and supporting “arcs” on the sleeves and pants. The unique font of the numbers reinforces the shield’s classic bold typeface with angles and dimensional treatments conveying depth and motion. The four uniform designs work together in a unified branded system, providing manufacturing efficiencies while allowing each team to retain its own unique and differentiated character.”

“We are extremely pleased with the names selected for all of our teams and the overall “Premiere” season uniform design,” said Frank Vuono, COO of the UFL. “Name selection for a new sports franchise can be an arduous process having to take into account the disqualification of many great possibilities due to trademark and copyright issues. There was a team of experts headed up by Jeff Sofka of Bendigo Co., and included Charley Inc., GameWear Team Sports, Purepartner, and many others who assisted in the name selection and uniform design processes and we are grateful for all of their hard work.”

The UFL launched its Name the Team Campaign with the redesign of its website in February. From that time, more than thirty thousand entries were submitted. Fans who submitted the selected names will be notified and given the appropriate credit.

The Las Vegas Locomotives’ first game of the season will be on October 8th at Sam Boyd Stadium against San Francisco. Tickets are now on-sale and can be purchased by calling UNLV Tickets Charge by Phone at 702.739.FANS or log onto www.UNLVtickets.com.
Source: http://www.oursportscentral.com/services/releases/?id=3883163

The Las Vegas Locomotives? Sin City Football Franchise’s Lame Name and Lamer Rationale Bode Poorly for Today’s San Francisco Unveiling
By Joe Eskenazi in SportsTuesday, Aug. 11 2009 @ 6:30AM
When is a name a trainwreck?
​The UFL announced the name of its Las Vegas franchise: The Las Vegas Locomotives. This is a remarkably banal and impotent name for a sports franchise — in Vegas or anywhere. We can come up with scads of PG-13-rated names better suited for a Vegas football team than “Locomotives” in five minutes (and we’ll do so after the jump). But this lousy, unimaginative team name was nowhere near as nauseating as league commissioner Michael Huyghue’s bogus explanation for choosing it.

“It was critical for us to select team names that we felt best reflected the local community while simultaneously defining the personality of the team,” he said. “Las Vegas was originally established in 1905 with the opening of the Salt Lake, San Pedro and Los Angeles Railroads. We wanted to honor the vast history of the city and the intrinsic benefits that this innovation provided to the community.”

Wow. Rosemary Woods was more convincing when she “explained” how she inadvertently managed to erase 18 and a half minutes out of the Nixon tapes.

In what way does Locomotives”reflect” Las Vegas more than it would any other of the literally hundreds of western cities and towns that got their start when the train came through? Let’s not waste words — it doesn’t.

If you were to choose 100 random people and play word association games, would any of them list “locomotives” as one of the first 10 terms associated with the word “Vegas”? The Vegas oddsmakers would probably put better odds on the Detroit Lions winning the Super Bowl.

So what you’ve got here is a generic nickname that has absolutely no special resonance for a Las Vegas crowd. It’ll be interesting to see how many of the other team nicknames are alliterate (this’ll be a challenge with Orlando, but the chances of San Francisco’s name starting with an “S” just got a bump from the bookmakers).

Finally, if the league couldn’t think of a relevant nickname, at least they could have found something cool. But “Locomotives” is a term that conjures up mental imagery of hokey 1950s-era announcers introducing Superman cartoons or overall-wearing toddlers playing with choo-choo trains. It’s just not a very modern or elegant word.

So what’s going on here? I would guess that the strategic use of the term “community” in Huyghue’s prepared statement implies that the league is trying to put forward some kind of misbegotten family-friendly vibe — so no mention of the one thing Vegas has that other cities its size don’t: massive gambling, gaming, and party-hearty industries. If this is the goal, it goes without saying that it’s a mistake. Las Vegas is fine with its dual identity; its residents long ago came to grips with the fact their hometown is simultaneously the nation’s decadent, booze- and gambling-saturated capital yet also a suburban sprawl of 553,000 people living in affordable homes and racking up massive air-conditioning bills. Look, the city’s own tourism ads tout the wild, anything-goes nature of Vegas and its mayor is a paid pitchman for Bombay Sapphire gin who told elementary school children that one of his favorite hobbies was “drinking.”

Las Vegans get it. They don’t need a whitewashing job — and, frankly, if that’s the UFL’s notion, it’s insulting to everyone’s intelligence. And if that’s not what the league is doing here — then they have quality control issues. Either way, it’s a shame: it’s easy to sit on the sidelines and predict imminent failure for a costly new sporting endeavor in this business environment, but Huyghue and the league have put forth a solid business model and feature teams manned by competent players and former top-level coaching staffs. Why ruin that good work with such a transparently awful team name and ridiculous explanation for choosing it?

Anyhow, here’s a handful of Vegas team names that are plenty better than “Locomotives,” knocked out in five minutes:

Aces, Blackjacks, Dealers, Dice, Desperadoes, Jokers, Suicide Kings, Hitmen, High-Rollers, Rollers, Fear, Scorpions, Highwaymen, Heavyweights, Bombardiers, Stallions, Slingers, Convoy … time’s up.

Anyhow, we’re now more than a bit wary of what kind of name the league feels “reflects the local community” here. We’ll know soon enough.
Source: http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2009/08/the_las_vegas_locomotives_sin.php