Tying up the grammatical issues related to team names, and whether they should be treated as singular or plural --

The Sports Writing Blogger says:

As I've gotten older, I've gotten more used to the idea that style isn't so much a matter of right and wrong as to just getting it standardized. I used to be fanatic, for example, about getting hyphenation right; now I realize that that can lead to insanity. There's no way to get it right. So I just take it as it comes.

So, with regard to subject/verb agreement on team names, especially the singular ones, I've worked places where it was done both ways. Just make sure it's right every time. My current place goes plural on everything. "The Heat are 2-3"..."The Lynx are 11-1"...I've kind of decided I prefer that style, and take my confirmation from the way the English do it.

Grammar writer and Garner cohort Jeff Newman agrees:

Seems to me that two things are complicating matters here. The lesser thing is a grammatical nicety about when a collective noun (board, couple, audience) takes a plural rather than a singular predicate. Far more important is the influence of British sport (we'd say "sports") where "Manchester are" is the absolute rule.

As an American lawyer and part-time sportwriter myself, I'd always use "Coyboys are" but "Dallas is." (OK, probably "aren't" and "isn't" lately.) Where the sense is the single entity, such as a party in a lawsuit, I might be tempted to fudge the subject in order to get a singular verb, such as using "Cowboys' management." But I'd still probably stick with the mixed American conventions ("Cowboys are," "Heat is").

Fowler probably should have had the first word, so he shall have the last (from his entry on collective nouns or "nouns of multitude"):

In general it may be said that while there is always a better and a worse in the matter, there is seldom a right & a wrong, & any attempt to elaborate rules would waste labour.