MSU made right call by ditching new logo

Last Updated: February 05. 2010 4:47PM
Lynn Henning
MSU made right call by ditching new logo

If there was anything good that came from the necessary flap over Michigan State tweaking its hallowed logo, it was that Mark Hollis, who had made his first big mistake as MSU athletic director, acknowledged the error Friday and canned Sparty's alterations.

Good decision. He did what too many executives or people in power don't do. He listened to his constituents. He made personal pride subordinate to the will of alums and fans. He bagged a logo that needed bagging.

Admittedly, when I saw the "new logo" I about choked. Change? This was change? Lengthening the noseplate? Making Sparty's cheeks a bit puffier?

This was supposed to inspire fans to sprint to the MSU Bookstore and load up on their new Nike apparel, all so they could proudly display a redesigned logo that was a bad distortion of what had been a perfectly neat, clean insignia of MSU sports?

Tim Staudt, the sports broadcasting icon in East Lansing, asked me on the air Wednesday for a personal reaction to the tweaked logo. I told him, fairly seriously, that it looked "like Jimmy Durante wearing a Spartan helmet." That new, lengthier schnoz was scornful.

And those cheeks? They looked like something from Jared's pre-Subway sandwich days.

This was the product of a year or two of creative minds meshing in an effort to give Nike and MSU a sizzling new symbol?

Be glad they didn't spend three years on it.

Here's the deal: Hollis and Nike are free, in this view, to cook up an additional -- even improved -- Spartans logo. But they will be hard-pressed to enhance the prevailing image, which is sleek and appealing. It is spare, uh, even spartan, in its economy and aerodynamic brilliance.

I would expect artistic minds to easily concoct a new logo that would be a sharp alternative to the existing institution. It might conceivably be so well-received that it would make the old Sparty a history piece.

Nothing wrong with those aspirations. But it must be a legitimate and attractive option. It can't be a diminished version of the current winner.

And that was the problem from the outset with this supposed "new logo." It was a stepchild to the original. It was change for the sake of change. There was no upgrade, no reason to see in the new rendition that anything had been altered for any reason other than Nike's benefit.

This was why Tom Izzo's indignation at the MSU fan base was so out of line a couple of weeks ago. Izzo is a great basketball coach. He is a superb employee. But loyalty to his boss, coupled with a financial interest in Nike's arrangement with MSU, were hardly honorable reasons to drop the boom on MSU's protesters.

Fans had neither their paychecks nor their Nike contracts in mind when they lambasted the new logo. Rather, their relationship with the logo was more spiritual. As either alumni, or devoted fans, their affection for the old symbol was pure. They loved how it looked. They worshiped what it expressed.

They saw nothing to love, nothing new communicated, by the longer nose and fatter jowls.

People are amused, invariably, when in a world with so many serious issues that something as comparatively trivial as a sports logo would set the campus afire in controversy.

But they miss the point. Can you imagine America, or the Defense Department, taking the symbolic eagle and turning it into a turkey?

That's what happened in East Lansing. That's why fans were properly outraged, and it's why Hollis honorably decided to listen to his audience.

lynn.henning@detnews.com

From The Detroit News: http://www.detnews.com/article/20100205/OPINION03/2050433/MSU-made-right-call-by-ditching-new-logo#ixzz0ehspjqb2