Block & Tackle is John Teti’s column about pro football and related sundries.
“How can I efficiently, adorably express the identity of my favorite football team in a text message?” It’s a question that has vexed fans for decades, even in the ’70s, when there was no such thing as text messages. But now there is such a thing, and moreover, there are emoji, the pictographic icons that make texting fun.
The visual vocabulary of emoji is vast, with miniature images that range from an electric train to a slightly different electric train. However, the emoji library does not include NFL team logos, which hampers pictorial football messaging. Until now. Block & Tackle has constructed an unquestionably correct chart of emoji to represent each team in the league, and by “chart” I mean “thing I made in Apple Notes during a terrible Monday Night Football game.” It’s presented below for your edification and reference.
You might be wondering how to use this new, painstakingly crafted visual lexicon. It’s easy. Say that you wanted to tell your friends, “I’m taking an electric train to the Ravens game at 2.” That could be expressed in emoji like so:
Sure, you could type out the sentence, but with emoji, you just browse through 41 incomprehensibly organized screens of symbols to find the one you want, tap it, and repeat this process until you’re done. Simple! Let’s try another one. “Breaking news: Jaguars players have been arrested at a Japanese love hotel”:
“The Cowboys transformed into a being of pure light and then flew away; you can now observe them in the night sky”:
“The Pittsburgh Steelers are cutting the hair of a woman who seems pretty happy about the whole thing”:
Have fun, and you’re welcome!