On Sunday, the Carolina Panthers take on the Cincinnati Bengals in what’s being called the "Queen City Bowl." Here are some suggestions for alternative names for the matchup.
First, how about the "Fighting Feline Fiesta" since both NFL teams have big cats as their mascots? Or how about the “Clawing Back Our Reputation Bowl”? In the last decade, Bengals players were among the league leaders in arrests and citations. In fact, since the year 2000, Bengals players have had at least 42 brushes with the law, according to the NFL Arrest Database maintained by the San Diego Union-Tribune. It was enough to make you wonder if their uniforms had stripes as a matter of convenience. The Panthers have behaved relatively better – just 18 incidents – but then again, the Panthers have the Kraken.
If you prefer a business angle – we could call this the "Banana Split This City Bowl," in honor of the good folks at Chiquita. The company, once had their world headquarters in Cincinnati before coming here where now they're trying to go Irish.
Now I get why the "Queen City Bowl" has cache. Both cities share the same nickname. But ours came from an actual queen. Theirs, a poem by Longfellow in which he called Cincinnati "The Queen of the West." (I guess the world really was smaller back then.) The poem is called Catawba Wine. And while we have no such particular varietal in North Carolina, we do have a college and a river with that particular name, so that’s got to go in our favor.
Even if the score doesn’t.
