If you were to select a Unicode symbol for every team in NFL, what would they be? It cannot be graphics, emojis, or ASCII art…you must select a single Unicode character for each team that are in the standardized blocks. That means, the character can be copied and pasted as text in any text editor, on any platform (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, etc.) and used in any coding language without requiring any graphics library.
The challenge is there are limited number of standard Unicode symbols and I tried my best to avoid using the same symbol for more than one team. For instance, there are 5 NLF teams named after birds (Ravens, Eagles, Falcons, Cardinals, Seahawks) and four out of which are birds of prey, and there’s a very limited option to choose from the Unicode blocks. Then we have 4 NFL teams that are named after big cats (Bengals, Jaguars, Lions, Panthers). Teams like Patriots, Browns, Steelers, Titans, and Commanders, pose some interesting creative challenges as no symbols directly map to them. And of course, we have horses and their variations such as Colts and Broncos. I think we can get close nevertheless. This is what I have come up with…
Sorted by conference (AFC East->NFC West) and within each conference, by team names (A->Z). Each Unicode codepoint is also shown (in hexadecimal digits).
For reference, below are the html entity codes used in the logo graphics above that can be used in a html page to render the symbols (from first/left column of 8 symbols to the right-most column of 8 symbols separated by line-breaks):
🐎 🐆 🤠 🔱 🐴 ⚡ 🪓 ☠
🛡 ⭐ 🦅 🗽 🐻 🦁 🧀 ⚔
🏴 𓅃 🐆 ⚜ ⛏ 🐦 🐏 𓅓
The hex code points used above are (from first/left column of 8 symbols to the right-most column of 8 symbols separated by line-breaks):
U+1F40E U+1F406 U+1F920 U+1F531 U+1F434 U+26A1 U+1FA93 U+2620
U+1F6E1 U+2B50 U+1F985 U+1F5FD U+1F43B U+1F981 U+1F9C0 U+2694
U+1F3F4 U+13143 U+1F406 U+269C U+26CF U+1F426 U+1F40F U+13153
What do you think? Do you have a more suitable symbol for a specific team? For Kansas City Chiefs, we could also use arrow or feather (instead of tomahawk above) keeping with their Native American theme I suppose as shown below:
As for my team, I’ll just give you a hint by sharing its color palette: 
I hope you enjoyed this post. Best of luck with your team as we are past the halfway point of 2024 NFL season!
