Content Creator Tony is back with TonySPN, a recurring series covering the weird wide world of sports!

After the Super Bowl last Sunday, we can be forgiven for feeling a little bit sports’d out. That’s why TonySPN is returning to the Friday Know-It-All. But instead of talking about the games, or the rules, or who is or isn’t the GOAT (sports-speak for “Greatest of All Time”), let’s talk about names.

Specifically, the historical events behind various team names. There are a lot of teams that are named after, say, animals (Detroit Tigers, Miami Dolphins, Toronto Raptors) or forces of nature (Carolina Hurricanes, Oklahoma City Thunder, Colorado Avalanche), but there are quite a few team names that tie into real, sometimes not-super-well-known history. Let’s take a look at those names and see what we can uncover.

Let’s pivot back to the Super Bowl. Back on January 24, Trivia Mafia ran a question about two team names being tied to respective gold rushes. The San Francisco 49ers are, of course, referring to the California Gold Rush of 1849. But then there’s also the Denver Nuggets, whose name alludes to the Pikes Peak Gold Rush of 1859 to 1861.

The creatively-named “Fifty-Niners” headed west to find their fortunes, and were a big reason why Colorado exists today. Well, the state, at least, the land was there before. In fact, cities as large as Boulder have roots as a gold rush community. Look at them now, they’re the 110th largest economy in the United States and host an annual Naked Pumpkin Run! And if you’ve ever wondered why the U.S. put one of their Mints in Denver, you can also thank the Colorado Gold Rush, as Congress (Well, the good part of it, anyway) established it in the 1860s.

Of course, the Colorado Gold Rush couldn’t last. The mines started getting tapped out in the 1860s, and folks soon (within 150 years or so) realized that the most valuable Denver Nuggets weren’t found in the mines. In fact, if Google is truthful that a one-pound gold nugget is worth $22,372 dollars, Nikola Jokić would have to mine 12,337 pounds of gold to exceed the value of the $276 million contract he gets from Denver just by being Nikola Jokić.

Arguably, we have a third connection to American Gold Rushes in a team name. Ever wonder what a Clipper was? The city of San Diego sure knew when they named the team that became the Los Angeles Clippers. The striking sailing ships were often seen docked in San Diego en route to Gold Rush-era San Francisco, but why would you want to take a Clipper on that trip?

Three words: Gotta go fast! Remember: sailing was kind of a crummy way of travel before we invented motors and minibars. To get to California entirely by sea from the East Coast, you had to do it the Magellan way – going all the way down to Cape Horn at the bottom of South America. The speed of Clippers shaved a few months off a six-month trip, getting to as low as 89 days in 1854.

But enough about Gold Rushes! Let’s hop a Clipper to the other side o’ the pond, innit, to talk about the Cleveland Cavaliers. Modern-day Cavaliers like Zydrunas Ilgauskas and Tristan Thompson may have been in the business of defending King James, but for old-school Cavaliers, they were setting up in the post to protect King Charles.

3,700 or so miles from Cleveland, the Cavaliers were a monarchist faction of the English Civil War in the 1640s. This conflict broke out in response to King Charles I trying to prove he was a strong, independent man who didn’t need a Parliament. These geopolitical waves rippled all the way out to Cleveland, or would have, had it been inhabited for any part of the next century.

Nonetheless, the English Cavaliers and Cleveland Cavaliers share some major similarities. Both were owned big-time during very public low points, with LeBron taking his talents to South Beach in 2010 and Charles I’s head experiencing its own free agency of sorts in 1649. But both had their Restorations, with King Charles II assuming the throne in 1660, and King James winning a title for the Cavs in 2016.

On the other side of the political spectrum, we have the Philadelphia Eagles. Yes, that animal name. It turns out, there’s a history connection. And no, it’s not to do with the bald eagle, Philadelphia’s role as the early United States capital, or the American Revolution.

Instead, the historical roots of the Philadelphia Eagles only reach as far back as the New Deal. The Eagle was the mascot of the National Recovery Administration, which Franklin D. Roosevelt created to counteract the Great Depression by regulating costs and wages. The administration helped 23 million workers, a massive blunder that would seal its fate in 1935, when the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional.

This of course, leads to a very important question: Why would a football owner want to honor FDR and the New Deal? Well, Bert Bell and Lud Wray’s backgrounds didn’t fit what you think of when you think “NFL team owner.” Bell was a football lifer who spent the Great Depression years working as an assistant coach, which almost certainly made less money than, say, being an oil magnate. Wray was a World War I veteran, a demographic that made so little money that they were reduced to being shot at by Douglas MacArthur to make a living.

So how did they come into owning a franchise that’s today worth nearly $6 billion dollars? They did it through one simple trick: being the only bidder when the bankrupt Frankford Yellow Jackets went up for auction. That’ll do it, I guess.

That’s not even the only animal team name that has its roots in actual historical events. The Charlotte Hornets trace their name back to Redcoat General Charles Cornwallis, the leader of the Southern campaign in the Revolutionary War. What is it with these teams and British loyalists?!

Anyway, before suffering the dual humiliation of 1) surrendering to the Continental Army in Yorktown and 2) not even landing a speaking or singing role in “Hamilton” as a concession, he’s alleged to have compared colonists from the Battle of Charlotte to “a hornet’s nest of rebellion.” A bicentennial later, and Charlotte’s basketball team had a name!

There are even more fascinating origin stories for sports team names, and maybe we’ll revisit them in the future. But for now: That’s all you need to know this week!