Naming wrongs

Just to prove that no failed idea ever dies (hello, trickle-down economics!), the new-and-improved-or-something XFL is conducting its draft this week. The eight teams are divvying up 560 players in 70 numbing rounds, most of whom you've probably never heard of.

The No. 1 pick in the draft, for instance, was quarterback Landry Jones. You may vaguely remember him from such popular hits as Backup Quarterback For The Pittsburgh Steelers, Backup Quarterback For the Oakland Raiders and Backup Quarterback For The Jacksonville Jaguars.

In any case, this is not about that. This is about who the eight teams are, and why nickname coolness is apparently only a thing in minor-league baseball and hockey.

The eight teams are the Dallas Renegades, the Houston Roughnecks, the Los Angeles Wildcats, the New York Guardians, the St. Louis Battlehawks, the Seattle Dragons, the Tampa Bay Vipers and the Washington (D.C.) Defenders. None of them are the Montgomery Biscuits, the Greenville Swamp Rabbits or the Amarillo Sod Poodles, but you can't have everything, I guess.

Not even originality, in some cases.

I mean, come on. The Houston Roughnecks? That's just another way of saying "the Houston Oilers." There's even an Oilers oil derrick in the logo.

The St. Louis Battlehawks, on the other hand, just sounds like a shot at the Cardinals, who abandoned St. Louis a couple of decades ago. Cardinals? Pfft. A Battlehawk would EAT your Cardinals. So there.

A Guardian, meanwhile, sounds like the descendant of a Titan, which was what the Jets were called before they were the Jets. A Dallas Renegade is a Dallas Maverick gone really bad. And so on.

Ah, well. I guess it was too much to ask all those creative minds in L.A. to come up with something more cutting edge than Wildcats, which is currently the nickname for only about 4,567 youth football teams across America.

Personally, I kind of like the Fightin' Spielbergs. But that's just me.