I’m not a hockey fan, but I had a brief Mastodon interaction with Nick Heer (whose blog you should be reading because he’s very smart) about referring to the Florida Panthers’ victory as “Florida” in a way that doesn’t mean “the state of Florida” (which would thus include their other NHL franchise, the Tampa Bay Lightning).
I wasn’t a big sports fan growing up, but in college got way into college football1 and in adulthood have gotten into watching the Giants in MLB. I do read a decent amount of sports journalism, but I’ve been thinking about this matter a bit.
In college sports, it’s common to just refer to the name of the state for the “University of X.” “Iowa” means the “University of Iowa.” Someone writing about them might say “Iowa’s best season of all time was 2015, when they went 12-2,” and it would be clear that they’re not talking about Iowa State (who have never won ten or more games in a single season).2 A similar example of this would be easier to make in a state where the best team is not the “University of X,” and California is a good example of this.3 “Cal” refers to the University of California-Berkeley Golden Bears. They claim some national titles, with the last being in 1937.4 If they were to have a stand out season next year, it would be accurate to say that it’s the “first California national title in over 80 years,” even though the University of Southern California won the national title in 2004.5
But that’s college sports! I don’t follow as many pro sports, but most pro sports teams are named after their cities rather than their states. Offhand I could name a few, but I actually sat down to tally them across MLB, the NFL, NHL, NBA, and MLS:6
- Arizona Diamondbacks (MLB)
- Arizona Cardinals (NFL)
- Carolina Panthers (NFL)
- Carolina Hurricanes (NHL)
- Colorado Rockies (MLB)
- Colorado Avalanche (NHL)
- Colorado Rapids (MLS)
- Florida Panthers (NHL)
- Indiana Pacers (NBA)
- Minnesota Twins (MLB)
- Minnesota Vikings (NFL)
- Minnesota Timberwolves (NBA)
- Minnesota United FC (MLS)
- New Jersey Devils (NHL)
- Tennessee Titans (NFL)
- Texas Rangers (MLB)
- Utah Hockey Club (NHL)
- Utah Jazz (NBA)
I decided not to add the Los Angeles Angels who were, at one point, the California Angels. Nor the Miami Marlins (née Florida Marlins) or any other team’s old name.
I also excluded the Golden State Warriors of the NBA, because no one calls them “California,” which is the topic in question.
There are a few other things of note before I get back to the original, ostensible point of this post:
- While neither Carolina teams specify which Carolina, it is North Carolina for both.
- For Minnesota teams, all are based in the Twin Cities, but I think it makes sense not to try and distinguish which, and the cleanest way to do that is surely just by being “Minnesota.”
So a decent number of teams are referred to as their state, but out of all of them, only the Texas Rangers have another professional team in the same league in their state (the Houston Astros) other than the aforementioned Florida Panthers.
Thankfully for the purposes of looking at how sports journalists talk about this for pro teams, the Rangers won their first ever World Series last year. So did journalists call it “Texas’s” first ever World Series when their neighbors in Houston have won it twice in the last decade?
MLB.com only refers to them solely as “Texas” once by my count:
Texas invested a gargantuan sum of money in Jacob deGrom, only for its imported ace to blow out his right elbow after six starts.
The Athletic (News+ link) doesn’t refer to them as “Texas” once unless I’m missing something.
In the subtitle…er, subheading…article description toward the top under the title, Sports Illustrated calls it “Texas’s first title,” but you could argue that sentence actually starts in the title which calls them just the “Rangers.”
So with a pretty limited sample size to compare against for the only other pro team it applies to, it does seem the CBC headline Nick Heer originally posted is a bit more ambiguous than the standard for this kind of discussion, though somewhat in line with the SI article I found.
This was a fun dive of some sports research for me outside of the realm of sports research I’d normally be inclined to do, but I’m not convinced I nailed it.
- College marching bands play after every single down, so you’re much more engaged with the game than high school teams. Plus, after hearing a lot of bowl discussion, a few hours on a Saturday with my roommate trying to parse how the bowl placements worked took us down lots of rabbitholes that led me to hating Nebraska. College football is the best. ↩
- If you are interested in more ISU suffering: They have never won an outright conference championship, and it has been 111 years since they last shared a conference championship, the longest in all of college football. ↩
- Nothing against the Bears personally, this is simply an illustration, no ill will, etc. I initially was going to go with Ohio University, but the size disparity made it a bit harder to feel like the points I was making were accurate. ↩
- One of the beautiful things about college football is national titles were all just opinion-based for a long time until there was a formalized system only in the last few decades that people could agree on to determine it on the field. There were advantages to the vibes-based national title system for sure. I did not sit down with the 1937 CFB results to see if I would agree that Cal was the champion that year. ↩
- So there’s a lot of stuff about this win being vacated by certain groups, but I’m not gonna entertain the idea that they weren’t the national champs in 2004. ↩
- I’m just treating “New York” as implying “City” at the end. I don’t know if there’s any controversy about that for the Islanders? ↩
Ehler 