PHOTOS: Hidden images in sports logos you won't be able to unsee

How many times have you looked at the Falcons logo and not noticed the bird is in the shape of an F? You can be honest, this is a safe space.

We’ll start with everyone’s favorite hidden logo element. You may have seen it before, but if you haven’t, the laces on the Brewers’ logo form an M that combines with the B made by the pocket and webbing. MB. Milwaukee Brewers. Pretty awesome, isn’t it? Less awesome: The MB logo was only used from 1978-1993. The current logo contains no such magic, unless that magic is putting you to sleep.

Do you see the Capitol building formed under the head of the eagle? Is that the Washington Monument shaded in blue above it? (Maybe, maybe not.) Apparently, hiding national landmarks in logos is a staple of D.C.-based sports teams. (Well, that and not winning championships.)

In addition to being the name of Hofstra’s sports teams, a pride is also a group of lions forming a social unit. So rather than have one lion in their logo (a Mufasa, if you will), Hofstra has two lions (Mufasa and whatever Mufasa’s wife’s name was, if you will).

This is one of the more obvious ones, but it’s still a fun design element. There’s a cyclist in the logo (created by the letter R in “Tour”) riding a bike (with the back wheel made up of the O in “Tour” and the front wheel made up of the yellow dot that’s totally only there because they needed another wheel). Also, don’t sit down, Tour de France logo cyclist. That U seat looks like it’d hurt.

One of the Arizona Diamondbacks’ two alternate logos (yes, a team that isn’t old enough to legally drink has three logos) has a D and a B forming the head of a diamondback snake. There’s a little tongue at the bottom, which sort of ruins the subtlety.

The top of the I in “Islanders” points to the exact location of Nassau Coliseum on the map of Long Island. The problem is that next year the team moves 27 miles west to Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, which isn’t on the current map. (It stops just west of Nassau.) This shouldn’t be hard to fix. All the logo needs is a simple cartographic shift, like when the ACC had to expand the northern reach of its map to include Boston College. And don’t think the Islanders won’t be Islanders because they’re moving to Brooklyn. That’s still part of Long Island, despite the colloquial use of Long Island referring to anything east of the five boroughs.

There’s an M on the forehead of the horse, presumably for “Mavericks,” but you can never know with Mark, capital M, Cuban.

The hidden element in the logo for this small Division II school took me a while to figure out, and by “a while to figure out,” I mean “I stared at it for 30 seconds before giving up and Googling it.” It’s fantastic nonetheless. The Griffon is in the shape of Missouri! Some folks have said the Griffon is looking west to reflect St. Louis’s status as the “Gateway to the West,” but Missouri Western is in St. Joseph’s, a city in the western part of the state, so take that with a grain of salt. Either way, this is very cool.

The Tostitos Fiesta Bowl is no longer with us, lost to the ages like other defunct athletic sponsorships such as the Brut Sun Bowl, the Visit Florida Tangerine Bowl, the Gaylord Hotels Music City Bowl Presented By Bridgestone and that time Kim Kardashian sponsored a racecar. But during the game’s long history or during any tortilla-based snacking you’ve ever had, have you noticed that the two T’s in “Tostitos” are sharing a bowl of salsa made by the dot on the I?

The College Football Playoff has a logo that evokes the excitement of its name. In other words, it’s tremendously boring. The only flourish is the four laces representing the four teams that will compete in the mini-tournament. On the bright side, this design should easily accommodate an expansion to an eight-team playoff, but it could prove unwieldy when the football folks inevitably get greedy and increase the field to 68 teams like the basketball guys.

The line underneath the team’s name highlights the letters WIN. Twins Win. They probably stopped there because “except in October” didn’t fit.

Hidden letters are the most popular logo tricks. Sometimes, they work brilliantly, like the UAPB written in the mane of the University of Arkansas Pine Bluff golden lion.

Did you know there’s red on the tips of the Bulls’ horns? And that the red represents the blood of vanquished opponents? Neither did I. Yet, for some reason, I did know that if you flip the logo upside down, it looks like a robot reading a book on a park bench. Give yourself a minute. You’ll see it.

Speaking of accidental, the designer of the 2014 World Cup logo probably didn’t intend the rendering of the FIFA World Cup Trophy (the worst trophy in sports) to be an homage to the beloved Internet meme of a frustrated Jean-Luc Picard.

Sometimes they don’t, like in the Washington State logo, which is supposed to be a cougar made up of the letters WSU, but ends up looking nothing like neither of those things.

Can you spot the “H,” “W,” and whale fluke in the old logo for Connecticut’s long-lost hockey team?

But here’s the weird thing: As far as I can tell, this logo has nothing to do with the real Yoga Australia, the “national association for yoga teachers from all traditions and styles.” The website for the organization features a different logo, seen in the top row of the Google Image Search above. (I’ve reached out to Yoga Australia for clarification and will update this post with any reply.)

If you flip the Bulls logo upside down and take away the blood-tipped horns, people say you see an unhappy robot reading a book, presumably Asimov’s I, Robot, because things don’t end well for the machines in that one.

Another play on negative space has the “F” in Formula written in white, with the “1” formed by the outlines of the “F” and red racing stripes.

The Yoga Australia logo, which features the shape of the country in between the arm and the leg of the yoga poser, is beloved in design circles. It frequently pops up on lists of the greatest logos and a Google search brings up hundreds of different hits.

The Eagles’ is the only NFL logo that faces left. (Cincinnati’s did from 1997-2003, but then the Bengals switched to a striped “B” logo.) It’s also a noteworthy logo because the bird is flying down instead of up, which jokesters will tell you symbolizes the team’s annual playoff crash-and-burns. Some say the eagle faces left because there’s an “E” hidden in his nape, but that has the sound of something best believed after the third hour of tailgating.

Because the Big Ten is a ridiculous name for a conference with 14 teams and because there’s no such thing as stability in college athletics, the league wanted to get away from realistic numeric representations in its logo. That’s why the new logo spells both “BIG” and “10,” which can be used with any amount of teams in the conference. This is a shame, because the hidden “11” in this old Big Ten logo (when there were 11 teams) was phenomenal.

The NFL subtly changed its iconic shield logo in 2008, cutting from 25 stars, which had no meaning and was difficult for vendors to duplicate on small designs, to eight stars, representing each of the NFL divisions. The football in the middle of the shield was also slightly changed. The current version is identical to the football that tops the Vince Lombardi trophy, won by Super Bowl champions.

It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize the Wild’s logo, which depicts the North Star, evergreen trees, a red sky, the sun and a stream, also forms the shape of an animal head.

The Steelers’ hypocycloid logo is based on a steelmark logo created by U.S. Steel. After the logo was created, meanings were retroactively (and ridiculously, as you’ll see) applied to each color of the steelmark logo: “yellow for coal, orange for ore and blue for steel scrap.”

No, the “H” in the Canadiens logo doesn’t stand for “Habs,” the nickname of the team derived from Les Habitants, the 18th-century settlers in present-day Quebec. (The legend is that boxing promoter, gold prospector, Madison Square owner and New York Rangers founder Tex Rickard was told the “H” stood for Habs and the story caught on.) The “H” stands for something far more generic: Hockey. For most of the franchise’s first seven years, the famous C logo included an A, for Canadian Athletic Club. But in 1916, the A turned to an H.

This is easily the coolest logo that’s appeared on either of our lists. Designed by Richard Fonteneau for the Sanderson Men’s Varsity Golf Team, this swinging golfer/Spartan head is simply brilliant. Michigan State’s golf teams should back up the Brinks truck to buy this.

More eagles facing left! Can they only fly left? Are they bizarro Zoolanders? The “EWU” formed in the Eagles’ wings are a neat design element, though they’d be far more subtle if the wings were black.

There’s no hidden meaning in the Dallas Cowboys logo, it’s just an example of sports logo perfection. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the Cowboys have the best logo in sports. A simple, powerful and instantly recognizable design that’s so good you easily forget why it belongs to a team in Dallas named the Cowboys. (Texas is the Lone Star state.)

This is the logo of the now-defunct Canadian baseball team that became the Washington Nationals. Notice that the red, white and blue appears to combine to form letters beyond the larger “M” they form together. Do those letters represent the initials of owner Charles Bronfman? Is it an ELB for “Expos League Baseball?” This explanation appeared in a 1985 New York Times article: “The logo is composed of three colors – red, white and blue – and three letters: a large stylized ”M” for Montreal, a lower case ”e” for Expos in red on the lower left of the logo, and a ”b” for baseball in blue on the right-hand side.”

The nickname of the NHL team from St. Louis refers to the city’s rich tradition of blues singing. The blue note logo signifies the musical affiliation. It’s been said that the Blues’ logo resembles a stylized 64th note (and it does), with some claiming it’s a reference to the founding of St. Louis in 1764. But since there’s never been any official confirmation of this, add another to the “urban legend” category.

Because the Big Ten is a ridiculous name for a conference with 14 teams and because there’s no such thing as stability in college athletics, the league wanted to get away from realistic numeric representations in its logo. That’s why the new logo spells both “BIG” and “10,” which can be used with any amount of teams in the conference. This is a shame, because the hidden “11” in this old Big Ten logo (when there were 11 teams) was phenomenal.

Quiksilver is the well-known surfwear company, its logo presented above in red. Roxy is its offshoot brand geared toward women. Its logo was created by combining two Quiksilver logos, turning them on their sides and forming a heart. (Seen above in blue.)

We’re going to chalk this one up to urban legend, because we couldn’t find a single reputable source confirming it. But lots of Internet chatter has speculated that the original Texas Rangers logo — featuring a capital R and S in “RangerS” — represents the initials of the team’s original owner Robert Short.

Any baseball fan can tell you there’s a representation of the New York City skyline in the Mets logo. Most probably know that one of the city’s bridges and the Empire State Building appear too. But did you know that most pieces of the skyline aren’t just generic representations, but specific landmarks in the city? From the Mets website: “At the left is a church spire, symbolic of Brooklyn, the borough of churches. The second building from the left is the Williamsburg Savings Bank, the tallest building in Brooklyn. Next is the Woolworth Building. After a general skyline view of midtown comes the Empire State Building. At the far right is the United Nations Building. The Mets’ colors are Dodger blue and Giant orange, symbolic of the return of National League baseball to New York after the Dodgers and Giants moved to California. Blue and Orange are also the official colors of New York State.”

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PHOTOS: Hidden images in sports logos you won't be able to unsee

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